Fabulous reads – Seeing life in vivid colour

It Looks Like This, Rafi Mittlefehldt, Pan Macmillan, ISBN: 9781536200430

“WHEN did you know you were gay?” is usually the first question a gay person is asked. The answer: there is no single, defining “OMG, I totally like boys/girls only” moment, where it hits you square in the face. It’s not nearly as simple as that. It’s more of a culmination of moments, pooled together over the years, leading to a silent discovery.

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This novel quite accurately describes this through the story of 14-year-old Mike.

His parents are God-fearing folk, while his sister, Toby, is quite the opposite and questions everything. Mike is on the fence but believes what his parents, or more accurately, his father, tells him to believe.

Mike’s whole world simultaneously becomes whole and combusts when Sean enters the picture. It begins with a simple “hey”, a friendly basketball game, a French project and then blossoms into something quite beautiful. And tragic.

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The book includes the school bullying that most gay children are prone to, a conversion camp and total heartbreak.

Initially the writing threw me off as there are zero quotation marks for dialogue and no descriptions of how the sentence is said. It’s the literal version of a “he said”, “she said” conversation. I soon realised that my brain started skipping this entirely and that I was deciding how the character’s emphasised each line of dialogue. Their story and their emotions were completely at my command. It certainly won’t be for everyone, but by the end of the book I realised just how much more inclusive the writing style is.

While the overarching storyline is fairly simple, it doesn’t fall into the clichéd coming-of-age trope. Gay readers will enjoy this book as they will have experienced much of what Mike faces on his journey. I do however feel that all parents and parents-to-be should give it a read as it could change a child’s life for the better.

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