Recap FREAK SHOW by James St. James

Well... James St. James needs to have a one act monologue show somewhere and it would be marvelous! His voice rings very loud and clear in his character Billy Bloom. Unfortunately St. James tries to merge his 20-something Club Kid persona into a younger teen version. While the book has its moments of being very funny and painfully overly dramatic, there isn't a lot of overwhelming sympathy for the main character. Billy lives inside his head and pretty much nowhere else. The plot (was there one) gets convoluted with trying to figure out if the outrageousness being written is happening inside Billy's head or for real, and whether or not it is truly as outrageous as Billy's declaration of it. Our group felt that Billy is not a character with which many teens (even drag queen teens) would really identify. Mainly because it is VERY clear that Billy has a very elite lifestyle - from Darien to Ft. Lauderdale and living in a self-described compound with a personal attendant - which tends to alienate many of the teen audience.

The book works hard to portray a "poor, unloved and abused drag queen" scenario, but our book club felt that the real issue wasn't the drag queen aspect at all. Instead the more serious, and relatively ignored, issue is Billy's bi-polar behavior. Although we are not convinced that this is a high quality GLBT book (good fluff, yes), the popularity of it speaks to us as it has been nearly impossible to get the book from a local library (most were either missing or checked out). Obviously the book is generating some sort of impact and we'd be curious to know exactly what it is! In the meantime, we're looking and recommending other GLBT books with solid, strong, positive messages for it's readers.

Next book: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie