The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Watching for Comets
By Jordon Greene
Published by F/K Teen, 2020
Four stars

I do like comets. I watched Hale-Bopp in 1997, flying to New Orleans with my two tiny children in my arms and sleeping on my feet. The title alone drew me to this book.

Jordon Greene does a great job channeling the angst and confusion of being a teenager. All these kids, but especially the protagonists, Aiden Molina and Tyler Gentry, jump off the page. The dark little center of this story is the recent death of Brayden—who was Aiden’s best friend and Tyler’s boyfriend. The added complication is that Tyler had stopped speaking to Aiden long before their mutual friends death out of a misplaced sense of jealousy.

So the core of the plot is watching these two boys negotiate their grief and their deeply mixed feelings for each other, much of it coached by their mutual friend, the dominant-yet-loving Kallie.

But it’s not quite so simple, since these boys are in small-town North Carolina, and come from two very different families. In spite of an absent father, Aiden’s Latino family is supportive and loving of his gay self. Tyler, on the other hand, is from an orthodox Baptist clan, which means church three days a week and a marked lack of compassion for his coming out.

Oddly enough, these are not the main difficulties Aiden and Tyler face. Not even the casual, cruel homophobia Aiden suffers at the hands of the school jocks really causes trouble. It is their own demons, their own teenaged idiocy (which is real and painful, even if idiotic and frustrating) that creates their most difficult challenges. It is hard to watch them torture themselves and each other, but I suspect this aspect of the book will appeal more to actual teenagers than to an elder like me (I am apparently the same age as Tyler’s great-aunt Vickie).

The world teenagers inhabit—focused on their devices as an escape from both boredom and family difficulties—is rendered with unnerving precision. It is such a different world, and it’s important to record it in all its tech-enabled intensity. Even fiction is history, and Jordon Green gives us a slice of modern history through the eyes of young people.