The In-Between Bookstore, by Edward Underhill

[rachelmanija]

Darby, a transmasc guy from a small town in Illinois, has been living in NYC for ten years, since he turned eighteen. He's acquired queer/trans friend group, but just got fired and is about to lose his apartment. He decides to temporarily move back in with his mom in Illinois. But things have changed in his town. Michael, his old bestie/crush, who he had a terrible breakup with ten years ago, has come out as gay. And the old bookstore Darby used to work at is still there... and his pre-transition teenage self is still working there.

Isn't that a great premise? The central conceit of meeting your own younger self when you return to the town you grew up in is such a perfect metaphor, made even more powerful by the split between pre- and post-transition.

Unfortunately, most of the book is not actually about that. It's mostly about Darby just kind of hanging around and feeling repetitively guilty about having been totally out of touch with his extremely supportive mom, and crushing on Michael while they both either fail to or refuse to actually communicate about either their present feelings or what went down between them as teenagers. (Darby literally can't even remember what their fight was about, but when he tells Michael this, Michael gets mad and stomps off without telling him.) When Darby finally does actually talk to his teenage self, he's mostly interested in trying to stop his teenage self from getting in that fight with teenage Michael.

This would be kind of okay if the book was a romance, where things are centered around the romantic relationship, but it isn't. It's a coming of age story, but it's only in the last two chapters that any actual character growth happens. Up until that point, Darby is kind of maddening. He's 28 but acts at least eight years younger. That's the point - he's a case of arrested development - but it was so annoying to read. It doesn't help that Michael acts way more mature than Darby except when it's necessary to keep them from communicating about anything important, and then he just refuses to talk like an adult.

I found this book frustrating. The author is obviously talented but the book needed at least another draft. Also, the bookstore itself isn't important, it's just the place where young Darby works.

To my total lack of surprise, the big breakup was a big misunderstanding. Michael thought Darby knew he was gay and was being homophobic, but Darby had no idea and meant something else entirely, and then they never talked about it. In the present, Darby realizes that he doesn't communicate enough, resolves to fix that when he returns to NYC, and invites Michael to go back with him without ever telling Michael about the time travel that made him realize that. Michael says nope, they break up again but more amicably, and Darby goes back to New York. So most of the action of the book was a dead end.

The one part of the book that I really liked happened in the last two chapters, when Darby FINALLY does something with his teenage self that's actually about his teenage self. He orders a book on trans history, then gives it to teenage Darby. This doesn't change anything in the present, but Darby speculates that there are many timelines, and in the Teen Darby Meets Adult Darby timeline, that changed things.



I feel like I'm saying this a lot recently, but this book would have been so much better if the entire book had been about the supposed premise which in fact only got about 10% of the total page time.