Boy Like Me

Boy Like Me

Author: Simon James Green

Rating: A

Vibe:  1994 small-town coming-of-age with a secret library book, a margin-note romance, and a homophobic law to outrun.

It's 1994 in small-town Lincolnshire, Section 28 is the law of the land, and sixteen-year-old Jamie Hampton is handed a book by a subversive school librarian—a dull-looking volume called Wildflowers of Great Britain that turns out to be hiding a gay love story inside its respectable cover. Then Jamie notices something. Someone else has been checking this book out too, and they've left notes in the margins. So Jamie writes back, and what unfolds is a romance conducted in pencil—two boys falling for each other one annotation at a time, before either of them knows the other's face.

Half the book's pleasure is watching Jamie play detective, trying to work out which boy at school is on the other end of those margins while his imagination runs gloriously ahead of him. Green tells all of this with screenplay-style cues and footnotes that work as wry asides, and it sounds gimmicky in description but plays beautifully on the page—funny, intimate, and conspiratorial, like the book itself is leaning over to whisper to you.

What floored me is how easily Green moves between registers. One page you're laughing at a perfectly observed bit of nineties teenage humiliation, the next you're gut-punched by how dangerous it was to simply want what Jamie wants. He never lets the comedy soften the stakes, and he never lets the darkness curdle into misery for its own sake. That balance is hard to pull off, and he makes it look effortless. Jamie himself is the engine of it all—brave without being a saint, scared without being passive, a kid you root for so hard it aches.

Here's why this one lands so hard for me right now. Section 28 was Britain's "Don't Say Gay"—a law that made it functionally illegal for schools to acknowledge that kids like Jamie existed—and reading it today, while American classrooms strip their library shelves and politicians race to legislate queer kids back into silence, is a deeply uncomfortable kind of déjà vu. Boy Like Me is a warning, an argument, and finally a love letter to the very thing those laws are most frightened of—a book that finds a lonely kid and tells him he isn't alone. Books were where I figured out who I was long before I had the language or the nerve to say it out loud, so for a lot of us that isn't a metaphor. It's a literal account of how we made it through.

So yes, I loved this book—the kind of love that makes you want to press it into strangers' hands. It's funny and furious and tender, it respects its teenage characters without ever condescending to them, and it understands, all the way down, why books matter and why some people are so afraid of them. A solid A, and one of the best things I've read this year.