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The Evolution of Ethan Poe
By Robin Reardon
Kensington Books, 2011
Five stars

“I don’t pay a lot of attention; it’s not something I care about.”

How did I miss this for nine years? Now, I’ve read a lot of YA books with LGBT main characters. What prompts me to give any given book five stars is individuality – of style, of character, of setting, of plot arc. This is one of those books that stands out, because the title character, Ethan Poe, undergoes a dramatic transformation during the few months in which the story unfolds, while at the same time remains exactly what he is the whole time: a sixteen-year-old boy.

Ethan’s life seems to be crashing down around him: his parents, his best friend, his brother – all of them seem to be going off the rails. Then his little rural Maine town stumbles into a separation of church and state fracas over the teaching of evolution in the local high school, and Ethan is pushed to the edge of his ability to ignore things that make him uncomfortable. Add onto this the sudden apparent interest of a handsome boy he’s been yearning for, and the added complication that adds to his life, and you can imagine the veritable monsoon of emotional storms battering Ethan Poe.

There are some really difficult topics dealt with in this book – mental disorder, abuse, religious intolerance, community violence, teen sexuality – and Reardon handles them all with humor, plausibility and intelligence. What she gets especially right is the teenagers themselves. Ethan, to me at least, is as authentic as any teenager I’ve read about – because I hear my own voice from 49 years ago in him. Part of growing up – maybe the hardest part – is stepping outside of the self-absorbed tunnel in which all of us live when we’re teenagers. Mind you, not one single detail in Ethan Poe’s story is like anything in my own life, but the general sense of catastrophe at sixteen resonates completely. It’s hard enough to process being gay at sixteen, even in this “it gets better” world, without other disasters cropping up. I finally accepted that I was gay at 16, too, but that was in 1971 and I had lost two siblings and all of my grandparents in the last three years. I know what it is to feel totally terrified and adrift…and the way Reardon moves Ethan through his personal evolution is spot on – more than that, it’s filled with love and respect for what it is to be a teenager. She is tough but forgiving. We come to understand Ethan’s mind, and sympathize with his reactions, even as we root for him to move on and be “better.”

Indeed, nearly everybody gets a sympathetic hearing in Reardon’s story. She doesn’t try to make wrong right, or injustice justifiable, but she helps us understand what’s behind things. Human fallibility is something most teenagers haven’t got much training in, and Ethan Poe gets a whole lot of it as part of his evolution into a fuller, wiser, and more big-hearted teenager. It’s an amazing transformation, leaving the reader as surprised as Ethan himself.

I've read pretty much ALL of her books and she never disappoints.
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