THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!! 
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 A lot of people criticized this one for being so angsty, but I must like angst, because I really liked it. Dade has just graduated high school in Cedarville, Iowa, and though he comes across as introverted and detached, his life has a lot of drama. First off, he knows he's gay. There's his not-boyfriend Pablo, who has a physical relationship with Dade but wants to keep his girlfriend and jock status; there's Alex, the new guy who may be nice enough to wipe out Pablo's abusive nature; and there are his parents, to whom he's never come out, partly because of their own dysfunctional marriage and unhappy life in a huge suburban house on the edge of the cornfields. He befriends Lucy, a lesbian who's staying with her aunt for a few months, and the most transitional summer of Dade's life unfolds with many a revelation. 
 I really liked the writing in this book (in spite of many typos; who edited this?) -- it was atmospheric and sad. I felt that it really captured the feeling of living in the Midwest, and the uncertainty of being a teenager at a life crossroads. I loved the character of Lucy and wanted to be her friend, too. I even liked the large font and white space on the pages, which made it easy to read. The author seemed to have a great time making up band names (The Vas Deferens, Tomato Hoof), which were loved with all the passion teens have for their favorite bands, but won't date the book by being the names of actual groups. Even Dade's celebrity crush, Johnny Morgan, was (I think) made up. Totally brilliant idea. 
 I did think that the side story about a missing girl was not integrated well enough into the plot -- it lifts right out. The ending, also, was abrupt and somewhat unsatisfying after such a carefully-built world. Also, I dislike when books end with "I'm going to write a book about this...and it's the book that you just read." Still, a teen looking for a GLBT book will find a lot to appreciate here, as would a teen looking for realistic fiction about the summer after high school. Plenty of drinking, drug use, language, and sex (unprotected, it would seem...wish that was different), so know your reader. This is a lovely debut novel and I'd read more by this author. 
 Favorite quotes: 
 "My father thought [the house] represented a new level of adulthood and affluence, like it was a giant arrow indicating that they were moving in the right direction. But my mother saw it as a surrender to normalcy, a rejection of the fantasy where she created sculptures in the barn and heard the voice of nature in the black silence of the rural Midwest evening." 
 "I practiced saying I was gay to inanimate objects around the house. I told the soap dish in my bathroom, the ceiling fan above my bed, the blue drinking glass I favored above all the others simply because over the years its entire family had perished one by one during various interactions with hard surfaces around the kitchen and I'd convinced myself our solitude was linked." 
 "When they saw it was me, they each cocked a nostril and squinted at me in disgust." 
 "I wondered if I was finally able to say all this to Pablo because I had somewhere else to go and that somewhere else was Alex." 
 "June bugs spun around the porch light like little manifestations of panic." 
 "Being rejected by people I had nothing in common with was bad enough, but I wasn't sure if I was ready to be rejected by the very group to which I thought I belonged." 
 "I felt the vacuum in him. It was the same as the one in me. It wanted, but it didn't know what it wanted, so it pulled at everything." 
 "Go to where the fear is, right? Learn something new." 
 "It's so weird to be young. I realize that now. I look back on when I was like eight or nine, and my brain worked differently. It was like I was hallucinating. The way my mind worked had so little to do with reality that it was sort of frightening." 
 "The thought occurred to me that so much of life is reenactment, people doing things that they saw other people do in hopes that it could somehow make them rich or happy or popular. I wondered if people would be happier if they just were who they really were, if they didn't try and find themselves in other people." 
 "There was a fat silence, one that seemed almost reverent of all the things in the world that couldn't be understood."