Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green & David Levithan

I have not read many titles written by two authors, but I did read Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan and that’s when I began to admire David Levithan’s writing. Now I hear that John Green is very popular and when I found out about Will Grayson, Will Grayson written by Green & Levithan I thought I would give it a try.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson is fabulous. Not only because it takes place in the Chicagoland area, and not only because it is written by two extremely talented young adult authors, but because the characters are very alive and the story is true.

John Green’s Will Grayson is a young man who lives by a few rules: 1) Shut up and 2) Don’t care. He is kind of drifting in his school and social life because he ended up writing a letter to the school newspaper defending his best and long time friend, Tiny Cooper. Tiny is a huge human being and also very gay and Will was defending Tiny’s right to be on the football team regardless of his sexual orientation. Well, that gets Will kicked out of his Group of Friends and so he has Tiny and Tiny’s Gay-Straight Alliance (including Jane–is she a gay part of the alliance or a straight part of the alliance, Will wonders).

David Levithan’s Will Grayson is a depressed young man with very few friends, one of them being Maura, who Will sometimes sees as a nuisance and not so much as a friend. The person that makes Will’s day better is Isaac, someone Will has only talked to online and shared social networking sites with. Isaac lives in Ohio but decides they should meet. This is when Will Grayson meets the Other Will Grayson.

It’s a story about friendship and figuring out who you are (at least for today) and it’s a story about Tiny, who has written a musical called Tiny Dancer: The Tiny Cooper Story which puts himself and his relationships out there for everyone to see. It’s a fantastic book.

The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To by DC Pierson

Ever wish you could stay up endlessly, that you never needed to sleep, that you could spend your sleeping hours reading, cooking, learning, walking, anything you wanted to be doing? To be honest, I haven’t wished that, but Darren, the narrator of DC Pierson’s first novel, meets Eric, a similarly unremarkable high school sophomore (if only weirder than Darren), who The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To.

Darren draws, but is not one of those artists who spend all the spare time at the end of classes drawing, as that would draw attention to him and Darren doesn’t want to be noticed. He is surprised one day when Eric approaches him at the end of a class and asks what Darren was drawing during class. From that first conversation begins a friendship that is pretty much the first solid friendship for either guy. They enjoy spending time together and create an elaborate space drama called TimeBlaze, Darren drawing all of the characters, Eric creating personalities and dossiers, and both working on the Epic. One afternoon Eric decides to share his secret with Darren: Eric never sleeps, has never slept. “Prove it” is Darren’s response and the two spend a few days awake together until Darren falls asleep (and Eric smartly videotapes himself to continue proving it).

It becomes “Eric’s thing” that they talk about periodically, that Darren wonders what Eric can do with it and their friendship continues on until Christine comes on the scene. (It’s always a girl, isn’t it?) Eric’s secret gets out and soon the two are being chased by cops and a pharmaceutical company. There’s one more incredible aspect to Eric’s thing that adds surprise to the story.

It’s an entertaining, fast-paced read, and Eric and Darren (well, Darren) speak like teenagers (with lots of swearing as well as lots of “dude”), and there’s just enough suspense and mystery to keep this book from being only a coming-of-age story.