Carter finally gets it, by Brent Crawford

Will Carter - freshman, ADD, stutterer, and add immature, clueless, too eager, clumsy, and earnest. You have to love a guy like that. Carter bungles his way through his freshman year trying way too hard to be cool and together and even though he misses the mark by a mile, the trip is, well, a trip.

A love story starring my dead best friend, by Emily Horner

This book should have been a good one. On the plus side - not one, but two interesting plot lines. The chapters are titled "Then" and "Now", so it's easy enough to move between the two story lines. One story is about a girl, Cass, biking cross country with the ashes of her best friend to complete the road trip that the sudden death of her friend Julia prevented. The other story concerns a play that Julia wrote, and that her friends produce as a tribute to Julia.

But the story is weighed down with a seemingly endless preoccupation with feelings - everybody's feelings, endless discussions about feelings. Well, I've read a succession of terrific books lately, I was overdue to hit a clunker, or maybe I just didn't connect with the characters. Alex Sanchez and David Levithan do a better job with gay issues.

Illyria, by Elizabeth Hand

Magic. The magic of forbidden love between Maddie and Rogan. The magic of theater as the two lovers perform the lead roles in a production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. And magic in their discovery of an old toy stage made of paper and cardboard - a stage that lights, that changes backdrops and that snows as unseen actors perform to an invisible audience. Their love is as fragile and inexplicable as that paper stage. But there is magic.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan

John Green has never written a weak book, and this collaboration with David Levithan works too. Like he did in Boy meets Boy, David Levithan can bring to life an imagined world without prejudice, and the final scene in this book is a dramatic tour-de-force worth reading the rest of the book to get to. The awesome musical theater production - an autobiographical account of gay 300 pound offensive lineman Tiny Cooper's life and loves - is such a feel good scene. John Lennon would have approved that imagined perfect world - Imagine.