I loved Have You Seen Me. Have you ever found yourself reading a book, and you think … it’s so beautifully written, there’s going to be a misstep. There’s got to be because nothing could ring so true. That thought kept popping into my head for some odd reason as I read this, but every page I turned rewarded me with more honesty, effortless storytelling, and masterful writing.

The writing in Have You Seen Me had a certain quality that was remarkable. The sentence structures and the words selected aren’t showy. They’re not elaborate and extravagant. Yet they present a poetic rhythm contained within a realistic sensibility. Most of all what struck me was how powerful the story was at a sentence level and for a while, I was baffled how Nelson did it. Eventually, I came to the realization that what brought the seemingly effortless, excellent grammar* to such a high plane was the intensity of emotion that flowed through the entire work. This intensity embodied both the unconscious needs and conscious actions of the characters, and it gave a sense of absolute necessity to everything that is said, thought, or that occurred. Nothing is superfluous. Nothing is arbitrary or gratuitous. There is no room for that when you live on the knife-edge of passion and risk—of self and life.

The story centers on a deep and tortured friendship between two queer kids (high school age) in a small town in the Midwest. Vyv and Chris are both (mostly) in the closet, Chris more so than Vyv because he would not be accepted as gay in this small town and risked severe beatings or worse. At least Vyv tends to express her difference through a punk/goth style while Chris is trying hard to fit in until he can get away to college. He’s worried if he were outed, he might even end up thrown out by his own family. Vyv experiences severe anxiety/ depression/self-hatred, unable to express her true inner self in this backwater town (as she calls it). Vyv runs away from home while Chris does not, and this story follows what happens next.

I can’t highly recommend this enough. Have You Seen Me was a double nominee in the 2012 LAMBDA AWARDS for Best Gay Fiction by a Debut Writer and Best Bisexual Fiction of the Year. So I’m not the only one who loved it. Order the ebook or the high-quality handmade print book direct from the publisher here: http://www.cclapcenter.com/haveyouseenme/

*I use the word grammar to signify not just the sentence level grammar, but also the linguistic choices from word to sentence to paragraph to metaphor to symbolism, and so on. ( )