WAY TO GO

This book is more about discovering you want to go to cooking school. The gay part felt like a side plot. Honestly, there where pages and pages and pages dedicated to cooking details: the contents of the cupboard, the chef's knives, what the boy cooked for his family, how he cooked it, when he cooked it, what the chef taught him, ect., and ad nauseam. There should have been a picture of pots and pans on the book cover. The character was gay, but he didn't seem to be impacted by any gay feelings or thoughts during the story. The only time being gay ever came up was when he worried about seeming straight. He spent all his time talking to a girl and trying to talk himself into liking her. He didn't spend his time dealing/battling with his actual feelings/desires for boys. If he even had them, they were barely mentioned. More time was given to his cooking, career goals and friendships. The book does the bare minimum to say the character is gay. There was ONE sentence in the beginning of the book where it says he had a dream about a boy, one sentence where he said he was interested in the girl's brother, and one sentence where he said he had a hidden picture of marky mark. He didn't express any frustration in thoughts like, "I'm dealing with all these feelings for boys and I have to repress them to look straight." For the little time gay inner feelings impacted his life, he should have just said, "I don't date girls, NOT because I'm gay, but because I don't want sex." Or "I don't date girls because they have cooties! It not a gay thing." That would have solved his problem right away, and freed up more time for cooking.