How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity

As with all anthologies, some stories were better than others.Dear Lang, The Silk Road Runs Through Tupperbeck, N.H., The Missing Person, Fingernail, My Virtual World, and A Word from the Nearly Distant Past were all well worth the read.Dear Lang, The Missing Person, and The Silk Road Runs Through Tupperneck, N.H. made the entire anthology worth it for me.

This unusual book is an assembly of 12 stories of identity written by twelve authors of note in the GLBT community. It is unique, in that the stories vary from spiritually philosophical to personal histories to comic strips - all dealing with teen GLBT experiences.The book starts with a tale of young romance narrated by an unknown spirit of gays past now observing gays present and projecting their future. There are a number of brief views into the hesitancy of young romance with all the mental anguish so many teenagers suffer over their affection for another and that person's response. A young transwoman relates her first venture outside her home dressed as te girl she knows she is. In First Time, Julie Anne Peters expresses all their joys and fears as two girls stumble their way through their first full loving experience.Two adult perspectives complete the picture. A woman writes (again) to the daughter she lost when she lost her partner, who refuses to allow contact with the child they shared for several years; she doesn't know if this daughter ever receives her letters. A young Muslim father remembers as he travels with his two sons back to his Alma Mater to hear his former lover perform in concert. He has chosen to suppress his true feelings to live as his Iranian parents desire.Every reader will react differently to these stories, probably preferring one over another for their own reasons. The main point, I think, is that there are joys and sorrows in all relationships, no matter our orientation or identity.

If it weren't for the last piece, a novella by the talented Gregory Maguire (author of Wicked,) I'd rate the collection with 4 stars. Before Maguire's contribution, there is a lot of very interesting experimentation with story telling. One of the best pieces is a touching letter written from a woman to her estranged "former" daughter on the girl's 16th birthday. The story is cleverly told and heartbreaking to read. But Maguire's "The Silk Road Runs Through Tupperneck, N.H." bumps up my rating.It's come to be one of my favorite short stories. In the end, the story is a romance. But save for one scene, there is almost no romance in the story. The novella feels real, which is Maguire's talent. You'll read about two boys at the end of adolescence finding in each other comfort and a reprieve from the drama and tragedy that plagues them in their late teens while getting insight into their later lives as adults. It is excellent. I couldn't recommend this story and this book enough.

Required reading for everyone. Absolutely beautiful stories, full of romance, life, despair, and everything in between. Read it twice in a month because I couldn't stop thinking about it! AMAZING.

Don't expect much... It's all over the place!

My partner and I both read this book at nearly the same time, unbeknownst each other.A great compilation of queer short stories that I can wait to share with friends.

Wonderful shape, thanks!

I am a sucker for anthology so I absolutely loved this!! It supervised me that it contained a short bit of Two boys kissing by David Leviathan. Defiantly a good read, although some stories were either too long or not my taste.

I enjoyed the variety within this collection, unified nonetheless by the theme of gendered and sexual identity. The anthology includes stories of love, loss and betrayal, as well as specifically LGBT experience. Few are traditional short stories; there are two comic book stories, one novella and several use unusual voice or experiment with narration in some way. The stories are a mixture of realism and fantasy, and cover different time periods as well as a wide range of LGBT experience: male/male and female/female love and desire and the less often represented trans experience - both female-to-male and male-to-female.I particularly enjoyed Francesca Lia Block's "My Virtual World". An updated epistolary story, this is mostly told in the form of emails and presents a blossoming friendship between two emotionally raw teens. Another favourite for me was Margo Lanagan's retelling of The Highwayman, "A Dark Red Love Knot", with its themes of jealousy and betrayal. I hadn't read any Lanagan before, but I have now moved her up my wishlist :). I also enjoyed the gentle narration and effective metaphor of Jennifer Finney Boylan's "The Missing Person". My final top choice is Julie Ann Peters' "First Time", which is a touching tale of a lesbian couple's first sexual encounter. This story rendered slightly incorrectly on the kindle (I think) as I didn't realise how it worked to start with and had to go back and read over once I'd sussed out that there were two narrators telling the same story from their independent perspectives. The paragraphs alternated on screen, but there was no visual indication to cue the change. Possibly the print version uses a different font or some other indication? Anyway, I realised pretty quickly and was then able to enjoy the tenderness of the tale.There were no stories I actively disliked (fairly unusually for a mixed anthology like this), and the variety of material is a strong point in favour of this collection. If there is something you don't like, you can guarantee there'll be something else that you will. Most are pretty short, with the exception of Gregory Maguire's "The Silk Road Runs Through Tupperneck, N.H." which takes up about a third of the entire book and is therefore quite a different reading experience, having more room to develop characters and take its time. Both this story (the last in the collection) and the first - David Levithan's "A Word From the Nearly Distant Past" - feature narrative voices who are considerably older than the teen target audience and speak from a more experienced and informed perspective. Both still focus on teen experience, however, keeping the overall YA appeal. Any teen, LGBTQ or not, will find something that feels familiar here, in terms of the uneasy course of young love or the uncertain nature of adolescent identity.