Two Boys Kissing

Two Boys Kissing was a beautiful but also sometimes triggering book to read. At moments I found myself in it and teared up a little bit. This book is about 3 couples and a lonely guy. One of the couples are trying to make a world record for the longest kiss, the other couple has one trans male in it and are trying to get to know each other the last couple are usually going on cute lil dates and spend every day together. The lonely one is catfishing older guys on the internet just for 'fun'

Dieses 200 Seiten umfassende Büchlein begleitet verschiedene Jugendliche, die unterschiedliche Erfahrungen mit ihrer Sexualität machen. Währen Graig und Harry, die mal ein Paar waren, ein Zeichen setzen wollen, in dem sie den Guniess World Record des längsten Kusses brechen, kämpft Tariq mit schmerzvollen Erlebnissen. Peter und Neil sind ein typisches Teenager-Couple. Avery und Ryan lernen sich erst kennen und Cooper fühlt sich, als wär er allein auf dieser Welt. All diese Geschichten haben mich sehr bewegt. David Levithan schaffte es mit so wenigen Seiten, dass mir die Charaktere am Ende völlig vertraut waren. Diese verschiedenen Beziehungsstadien, Gedanken und Gefühle zeigen einmal mehr, dass jede Liebe anders zum Ausdruckt kommt. Aber auch, dass manche sich vollständig vor dieser verschließen. Am liebsten würde ich einen Aufsatz darüber schreiben, warum ich finde, dass noch viele andere, dieses im Jahr 2013 erschienene Buch lesen sollten, aber leider fehlen mir hierfür die Worte. Das hat den einfachen Grund, dass vor allem meine Gefühle und Emotionen vollständig von diesen Geschichten vereinnahmt wurden. Mir gerade aber überhaupt nicht gelingt, diese in Worte zu fassen. Selten habe ich so viele Sätze markiert, die mich direkt ins Herz trafen und zum Nachdenken anregten. Die Erlebnisse der Charaktere decken von herzzerreißend bis zuckersüß so ziemlich alles ab. Lassen Lesende mitfühlen, mitleiden. ‚Two boys kissing‘ hat mir einfach sehr viel gegeben.

This Book was ok. Not good not Bad. But what i habe to say is that i have never read something linke This. If you want to read a simple Book and maybe get out of a reading slump, read This

Sometimes I had difficulties keeping the three couples of characters apart whole reading, they seemed so identical "inside" at moments. Otherwise, a great, touching and important novel. [Prtf]

I enjoyed this book. It showed different sides of LGBT community in America and things they need to go through that are pretty much true. Bullying, family acceptance, self accept.. All those things in one book written amazingly.

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read my complete review: http://isabellsbooks.blogspot.com/ I loved this book so much. I started reading it and loved it immediately and didn't stop loving it for a single page right until I read the very last one, including the author's note and acknowledgments (which I, by the way, always read). In my opinion, this would be the perfect first queer book for anyone to read. I kinda wish that it had been my first queer book because it just incorporated everything that I want in a queer book in such an amazing way. I wanted to read this book for a while but never wanted to buy it with the cover that comes up when you search it on Amazon because I just don't really like covers with real people on the cover - except for movie covers or memoirs/biographies obviously - and therefore hesitated for a long time to order it. Especially because I knew that there also existed this beautiful blue cover but I couldn't find it on Amazon. And when I finally did find it last weekend, I immediately orderd a copy. (hint: you need to search for "Two Boys Kissing Egmont" to find the edition that I have on Amazon.) This is now the fourth book that I've read of David Levithan. The first book was the collaborative work "Will Grayson, Will Grayson" with John Green which was amongst the very first queer books that I read or maybe even my first one ever and I really didn't like it. It is probably the only queer book I've read so far that I didn't like at all. And because I've read many books by John Green beforehand I thought that I probably just don't like David Levithan's writing. Now that I've read and loved David Levithan's "Boy Hearts Boy", "Every Day" and now "Two Boys Kissing" I think that it might have still been John Green's writing in the book that I didn't like. Because David Levithan has now become one of my favourite authors and I cannot wait to read more from him. He's just such a guarantor for queer books. So I must say that when I started reading the book and figured that it told the stories of different characters I was a bit unsure for a tiny moment if I like that. But I very much did. All the four stories were very interesting and provided the reader with a very diverse group of characters and especially a very wide range of queer characters and different queer stories. There are characters struggling with their sexuality, there is even a trans* character, there are boys falling in love, falling out of love, being in love, searching for love, coming out to their parents, coming out to the world, struggling with their coming out, and just a whole variety of stories of what it means to be gay in this present time. I think my favourite story was the one of the Two Boys Kissing - Harry and Craig - who want to break the record of the world's longest kiss and want to thereby make a statement of it being a kiss of two boys. I especially love the fact that this is based on a true story because I think that it's just beautiful. The way in which their (kissing) story gets described in the book is very realistic and makes it impossible for the reader to not imagine oneself in this situation and how and if one were able to pull this through - kissing for 34 hours. My second favourite part of the book was clearly the narration of it. As I wrote before, the "gays of the past" narrated this book and while they often just told the stories of all those present time queer boys, they also often told their own story and wove it into the present stories which I think was absolutely beautifully done. I think it's quite a hard concept to grasp if you haven't read the book but I want to stress that I just loved this idea because it gave the book so much depth and made it far more tragic than it would have been without this. And now you might wonder why I'd want a book to be more tragic - but this is exactly what I meant when I said that I think that this would be a perfect first queer book for anyone. Because it doesn't just tackle the positive sides and the present struggles of being queer but it also deals a lot with the queer history which I think is done way too rarely in queer books. I obviously love just-positive queer books and completely understand why especially queer authors wouldn't want to use insulting language to their own sexuality when writing a book - but I also think that it is very important to be aware of the queer history and about the battles that those before us have fought to get us to the place that we are in now today. And there obviously is still a lot that needs to be done but there's also a lot that has already improved so much - which becomes especially clear in this book when the narrators talk about the fact that if AIDS had affected not the gays but the privileged that they would have invested enough money into research to find a "cure" earlier than they did - because so many thought that AIDS was just God's punishment. I think it's amazing that the author managed to put so much - so many emotional and relatable and beautiful and tragic and understandable stories and so much history and depth into just 244 pages that are also incredibly easy and quickly to read through. Especially the fact that those different stories get always interrupted by another story makes one want to read even faster because you just need to know what's coming next. CONCLUSION I can wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone. Especially since it's Pride Month at the moment, I think that this would be a perfect start into queer literature. It is such a short book but packed with such a wide variety of what it means to be queer. And it is also so beautifully written that you could actually read through it within a day or two.