This is a gay novel that basically felt like it was written for me. It's a story about two guys who fall in love at their East Coast boarding school in 1978 and then have one perfect summer together in New York City before they go to colleges on opposite coasts and lose track of each other. Fast forward to 1998 and Travis, the West Coast neurotic history professor, suddenly realizes that he's been searching fruitlessly for another Craig his entire adult life, and maybe it's time to go find him. But can he find Brigadoon again?
The novel is an epistolary for the late twentieth century, which means journal entries and class notes and school assignments in 1978 and then law firm memos and emails and formal letters in 1998. It's also full of baseball and musical theater and even Alexander Hamilton references and plot lines, which also made me feel like there was a secret code running through the book that only I (and people like me) could decipher. That feeling went beyond the topical references, though. It's also a book that feels incredibly grounded in American gay culture over those twenty years, and there's a richness and authenticity to it that is often lacking in a lot of the m/m romance novels I read. I'm not even sure I would characterize it as a romance novel, even though it has the required happily ever after (although not in exactly the way I was expecting). It's about finding your first love again, but it's also about being some of the survivors of the AIDS epidemic, and living with that, and figuring out what matters most in your life after that.
My only real criticism of the book is that Craig ends up feeling a bit more fleshed out and real than Travis does, and there are a few moments when the conceit behind the format of the novel almost breaks. But on the whole I loved finding Brigadoon again with both of them.
Grade: B
The novel is an epistolary for the late twentieth century, which means journal entries and class notes and school assignments in 1978 and then law firm memos and emails and formal letters in 1998. It's also full of baseball and musical theater and even Alexander Hamilton references and plot lines, which also made me feel like there was a secret code running through the book that only I (and people like me) could decipher. That feeling went beyond the topical references, though. It's also a book that feels incredibly grounded in American gay culture over those twenty years, and there's a richness and authenticity to it that is often lacking in a lot of the m/m romance novels I read. I'm not even sure I would characterize it as a romance novel, even though it has the required happily ever after (although not in exactly the way I was expecting). It's about finding your first love again, but it's also about being some of the survivors of the AIDS epidemic, and living with that, and figuring out what matters most in your life after that.
My only real criticism of the book is that Craig ends up feeling a bit more fleshed out and real than Travis does, and there are a few moments when the conceit behind the format of the novel almost breaks. But on the whole I loved finding Brigadoon again with both of them.
Grade: B
