Tomorrow Land (Boy Meets Boy)

Boy Meets Boy

by David Levithan

When I was six-years-old I was desegregated and remember that as a hellish nightmare I survived. Time changes everything and things remain the same-ish. My daughters did not traipse through their childhood and emerged totally unscathed. But I hold onto the belief that they don’t have the memories I have.

That said, there is a future I believe will one day come to pass. One very important aspect of that ever elusive future rest firmly in the pages of this book. Paul is just another teenage, middle class, suburban kid, f—ing up his way into adulthood. Maybe I wasn’t rooting for him as much as I would have liked to, but I was rooting for Noah.

The harshness of the world in which Paul, Noah, Tony and especially Infinite Darlene would exist, is absent in this book. For that I am grateful. Not in the bury my head in the sand way, but in the better tomorrow way.

There is a future I believe will one day come to pass. Not Orwell’s future, I’m so completely afraid has already happened. But the flip phone arrived a few decades after, “beam me up Scotty,” making everything seem possible.

Perhaps this story and stories like this are the way we make that future happen. We create its existence my putting it in print and the words reverberate in the world and truth becomes stranger than fiction.

From experience, I really do wish we didn’t have to send our children out there to bleed to manifest a reality, and this book is one step forward. So, maybe I didn’t like Paul all that much, but I really did like this book.