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Edited by Tracey Pennington, with a forward by Kathe Koja
Awake features four novellas by some wonderful authors...
Worth Waiting For, by Nancy Garden
When a young lesbian, Marina, falls in love and joins a gay-straight alliance, she learns just how her beloved, very religious mom feels about gay people, and is faced with an agonizing decision.
A Line in the Sand, by Robin Reardon
What could have been just another summer vacation on Hilton Head Island for 15-year-old, out-and-proud Dustin Hamilton takes turn after turn as his infatuation for the exotic Randy Aziz spins him in different directions. Dustin's clear but unspoken challenge to Randy, “Come out of the closet for me, just for a week,” receives first a tentative and then a joyful “Yes!” from Randy. The boys spend days, and a very special evening, on the beach together, learning that their lives are similar in some surprising ways. But coming out takes Randy in a direction neither boy predicted. It's a summer the boys—and their families—will never forget.
Shattered Diamonds, by Jordan Taylor
Told from the point of view of the bully who has made the effort to view the video journal entries of the boy he and his friends have unmercifully harassed. The story painfully inches toward the bully’s epiphany: “The truth—that tiny, precise spark which occasionally crosses my path—is that I do not know how to face his mother and say, ‘I killed your son.’”
Pervert, by Brian Katcher
The unnamed protagonist secretly dresses in his mother’s and his sister’s clothes and suffers the shame that attends any realization that one’s physical gender is just simply “wrong.” But the boy’s sister comes to the rescue and actually accepts him to the point of dressing him up herself. His sister concludes: “Sometimes holding something inside can just eat you up. Sometimes a secret isn’t so hard to deal with if you share it with someone.”
And here's something else really great about this anthology: all net proceeds will benefit The Trevor Project, the 24 hour lifeline for GLBTQ & Allied youth in crisis at 1-866-4-U-TREVOR (1-866-488-7386.)
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