As my middle-grade manuscript continues to wander through what is turning out to be a longer-than-expected submission process, I’ve tried to stay on top of my reading, grateful that it has included Aiden Thomas’s fun, powerful YA novel, Cemetery Boys.
There are so many things to recommend this book. Strong, clear writing. Carefully paced plotting, and its corollary—tension built with fine-grained control. And the genre—“paranormal romance,” or a love story folded into a ghost story—makes it perfect for Halloween. (Though I’m down for a good ghost story any time of year.)
Of course, one also has to recognize what this novel does for queer trans Latinx visibility. The protagonist, Yadriel, has all three of these identities. Even in 2020 (or especially in 2020), the publishing industry continues to suffer from a lack of diversity—a fact that most of us within it know, but do too little to address. Cemetery Boys is an inspiring example of how that industry could be—a bit of good news during this otherwise bad-news year.
It would be good-enough news to feature a type of character that readers don’t usually get to see, but Thomas goes further by cultivating meaningful connection with that character, regardless of where the reader is coming from. I suppose I’m a great argument for the book’s success in that regard. I do love paranormal fiction, but I don’t read a lot of YA, and even less romance. More to the point, I’m white, heterosexual, cisgendered, and male. And yet in Yadriel, I easily recognized struggles I’d felt in my own youth—especially in terms of figuring myself out and then wanting to be accepted for that.
In other words, the experience of adolescence depicted in Cemetery Boys is both unique in its details, and tending toward something shared. That's no mean writerly feat. There’s a moment right before the novel’s climax, where Yadriel and Julian (his love interest, who also happens to be a ghost) race a stolen Corvette Stingray to a beach along the Pacific Coast Highway, reggaeton blaring through open windows, to crash a party thrown by the popular kids. I couldn’t help but think of the last-night-on-earth abandon near the end of Rebel Without a Cause, that 1950s white suburban teen-angst archetype with the hidden history. James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo—playing characters raucously, transiently living out their own domestic fantasy in an abandoned Los Angeles mansion, both different and not so different from Thomas’s Yadriel and Julian.
Yet even as Cemetery Boys reminds us of feelings we’ve all contained at some point, it contains something new and compelling. As Rebel’s mansion—a haunted house of sorts—and countless teen slasher films have made clear, there’s a natural narrative symbiosis between adolescence and horror. That tradition doesn’t prepare you for the masterstroke of placing a trans teenager in a ghost story, in which the relationship between body and soul (or spirit, or consciousness, or identity) is already foregrounded, and also somehow not determinative. Indeed, the novel’s focus on ghostly bodies kept bringing me back to a simple, infuriating contradiction that causes so much grief for all of us, but perhaps especially for trans kids. We live in a culture that encourages us to become who, in the deepest, least tangible parts of our being, we know we are. And then, all too often, that culture does everything in its power to stop us.
Anyway, five stars for this book.
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