Trebor Healey
Author of Through It Came Bright Colors
About the Author
Image credit: Ashe
Works by Trebor Healey
Associated Works
Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person (2004) — Contributor — 67 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Places of residence
- Seattle, Washington, USA
Los Angeles, California, USA - Education
- University of California, Berkeley
- Occupations
- writer
- Awards and honors
- Lambda Literary Award (Dr. James Duggins Mid-Career Novelist Prize ∙ 2013)
Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize (2013)
Members
Reviews
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 9
- Also by
- 13
- Members
- 236
- Popularity
- #95,935
- Rating
- 3.6
- Reviews
- 1
- ISBNs
- 17
While Neill is exploring his burgeoning sexuality, his family appears, on the surface, to be coming unravelled. His "golden boy" younger brother Peter is undergoing a series of increasingly more disfiguring cancer surgeries and his parents are having difficulty coping. It is in the juxtaposition of the scenes of Neill's family (in present day and flashback) as they tentatively, awkwardly, knit together, with flashbacks to the nightmarish erosion of Vince's homelife that the book exhibits its major strength. Ultimately, Neill realises that the true pleasure of love is in the giving of it, not the receiving of it. When someone accepts your love, they also accept you. Individual scenes between Neill and each member of his family (including his macho older brother Paul, who, like Vince, pushes him away) tenderly, sometimes painfully, illustrate this.
At times the book has a bit of a cobbled together feel with some clumsy transitions between episodes in the Tenderloin with Vince, scenes of Neill's family life and the numerous flashbacks/reminiscences (with one particularly jarring shift of POV in a fairly short flashback sequence between Vince and a female psychologist that should have been either re-worked or expunged entirely). These things might easily have been remedied with the expansion of some sections (to smooth transitions) or perhaps by using a third person limited (as opposed to first person) narrative, but on the whole the book reads smoothly and coheres quite well. And these shortcomings are far outweighed by the carefully chosen language, rich with metaphor, and the overall emotional impact of story. All in all, I highly recommend this book.… (more)