January 2021 reading wrap-up

“It’s impossible to let go of the people we love. Pieces of them remain embedded inside of us like shrapnel. Every breath causes those fragments to burrow through our muscles, nearer to our hearts. And we think the pain will kill us, but it won’t. Eventually, scar tissue forms around those twisted splinters like cocoons. They remain part of us, but slowly hurt less.”

From At the Edge of the Universe by Shaun David Hutchinson

At the Edge of the Universe / Shaun David Hutchinson

In the past few years, queer themes have become more prevalent in young adult fiction, and while increased representation is certainly a good thing, I’ve found many of these new books miss the mark for me in some way. Most seem to lack a lived-in feel that made the queer stories of the early to mid 2010’s so great, like Ari and Dante, Cameron Post, and others.

Written in 2017, At the Edge of the Universe came at the tail end of that period, and it deserves its place among the best.

The book opens by laying out three distinct circumstances for the reader: our main character, Ozzie, was pulled off a plane that would blow up on take off. He was on that plane to search for his boyfriend Tommy, who disappeared one day and was erased from the memories of everyone except Ozzie. Also, the universe is shrinking.

Even with those fantastical elements, the book remains grounded in the teenage experience, as Ozzie deals with the pain of losing his boyfriend, and the uncertainty of his future. Hutchinson lets each of these threads breathe throughout the book’s 500 pages, before pulling them in tightly during its fantastic closing.

This, as well as Hutchinson’s other book We Are the Ants, are exactly what I want from queer young adult books, and representative of the best that subgenre has to offer.