Tim Federle's (Better Nate Than Ever; Five, Six, Seven, Nate!) confident YA debut, The Great American Whatever, stars 16-year-old Quinn Roberts, a film-obsessed gay teen from western Pennsylvania, struggling to recover from the death of his sister, Annabeth. The day she died in a car accident, he started wearing earplugs and "gave up on becoming a screenwriter, or an anythingwriter, or an anything." The story kicks off with Quinn's best friend, Geoff, dragging him to a party, where Quinn meets a cute Iranian-American college guy. The promise of romance helps draw Quinn out of his extended mourning period, but he still has to deal with his mother's paralyzing grief and a number of harsh realizations about the sister he thought he knew everything about. If Quinn's life were a screenplay, he says, his would be "a fairly standard coming-of-age LGBT genre film, with a somewhat macabre horror twist." Quinn is underselling his own story, which reveals new levels of heart as it follows the occasionally surprising arc of his recovery.
What sets this fantastic novel apart is Quinn's brilliantly realized, often hilarious first-person voice, from laugh-out-loud asides ("My mom's theory--which I fully endorse--is that fruits are best in a cobbler and vegetables are best in the ground") to heart-wrenching admissions, such as the wry observation that earplugs "give the world a comforting dullness." Quinn's tendency to view scenes from the perspective of a true film geek has him occasionally re-inventing real-life dramatic moments as fictitious screenplays. Charming and imaginative. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC