Last month, winter got so real it was straight boreal. Unable to go outside, you exhausted the very easily exhaustible selection of gay movies on Netflix [side-eye], had a breakdown, and read a thought provoking, soul shattering, work of gay fiction that left you changed for the better but significantly more depressed. You’re so thirsty, you're considering going through a rewatch of Hors les Murs just to feel, but I’m not going to let you. It’s spring, ennui is officially out of season, and After School Activities by new author Dirk Hunter (c’mon son, who you playing with that name though?) of Dreamspinner Press is the perfect transition into the light frothy mood you need to recover from the last few months.
Synopsis
<<Two guys insist on complicating Dylan O’Connor’s life: one, his bully, and the other, his best friend.
It started out simple enough. Step one, outsmart Adam with wit and flair, goad him into doing something stupid, and land him in detention. Step two, play video games with Kai all night and laugh about it. Go to bed. Repeat tomorrow. Only, Adam and Kai are about to change the rules on him.
First, Adam's bullying turns suddenly violent, leaving Dylan to wonder if his bully really needs a friend. Then, Kai makes an unexpected move Dylan has only imagined in his most secret fantasies. Only he'd never dreamed it might come at a price.
While Adam opens up, coming closer to revealing a secret he’s kept his entire life, Kai pulls away—even as they get closer than ever.
With everything he thought he understood turned upside down, Dylan must decide what he really wants from the men in his life—before inaction loses him the very relationships he's always relied on.
No pressure, Dylan. You got this. It's just love. How hard could it be?>>
High School? Really?
Yuuuuuup. Now I’ll admit, taking a trip to high school--which was painful for most of us the first time around--and reading about teenagers having sex isn’t the most comfortable nor even remotely appealing of romantic situations. However, if the adults of my generation and beyond can read a book about a boring ass, straight, high school girl boning a malevolent dead guy and a werewolf falling in love with a damn baby, I’m gonna go ahead and say that this is totally fine. As with all good romance reads set in high school, we’re dealing with characters who are more mature in many ways than most of their peers. What makes After School Activities a great high school romance read is that it doesn’t write them unbelievably mature. Oak Lake High junior Dylan uses words like “lithe” and makes references to fine art, but he’s also hormonal, occasionally incredibly insensitive, can’t drive, and plays video games with his besties. It’s a great balance that manifests across all the characters in the book in a way that even Mean Girls doesn’t quite get to for me. What I love most about Hunter’s setting and age choice here is that the way his characters can explore sexuality and love with a degree of openness that most gay kids still can’t have, but not cloyingly or untruthfully so. The sexual arrested development that I’m told is too typical of gay youth is present, but eventually it finds a deeply satisfying and hilarious resolution.
Dick Hunter? More like Dork Hunter.
Yet another fun detail that sets After School Activities apart from most romance novels in general is that if you’re paying close attention you can tell Hunter is a total geek. Dylan’s type when we meet him is Spider-Man spelled the way someone who grew up refusing to hyphenate out of principle would spell it. After one particularly upsetting event in the book, Dylan demands that he Kai, and Mel play GoldenEye and that he doesn’t care what anyone says, he’s playing Odd Job, which any gamer of our gen worth their salt would know causes an uproar among friends and can only be allowed under some dire circumstances. If you’re really on your game, you’ll also catch that one of the supporting cast who is just a genuinely great guy and wildly unafraid of the feminine for a high schooler is named for a sci-fi author from back in the day who wrote some fun stuff, but was just downright misogynistic. Revenge a la Dirk? That combined with Hunter’s author bio which I normally don’t care to read, but had me laughing outright, and you might feel better about having bought a romance novel knowing that your money is going to someone who’ll probably use it to buy a giant poster of Ianto.
Burn
So a character is brought up when convenient and so we move a little too fast past the major heartbreak of the book, but I mean this is kind of par for the course for romance novels, innit? If you can acccept that the background characters in RWBY are grey blobs that are all dressed alike, you can get over this. Literally the only issue I have with this book is that Dylan suggests the character Charlotte--whose supernatural ability to sense and contain drama makes her someone I wish I could have befriended in high school--would make a great congressman’s wife. I say that she could be UN Secretary General, but this problem alone speaks to the high level of awesome that After School Activities lives at. I actually care about how one imaginary person thinks of another imaginary person. Well done, Dirk.
