A LITTLE BIT COUNTRY

Country music, Southern food, and teenage dreaming populate this earnest debut.

Emmett Maguire knows exactly who he wants to be, and that’s country music’s biggest gay star. Luke Barnes knows who he wants to be, too, but he’s not about to tell anyone about it. When, at 17, both boys find themselves working summer jobs at Wanda World—a fictional, Dollywood-esque amusement park in Tennessee owned by country star Wanda Jean Stubbs—their very different lives collide. Romance blooms as the pair struggle under the burden of multiple secrets. No more can Luke bring himself to come out than tell his mother, who has multiple sclerosis, that the theme park is keeping food on their family table: A messy history ties Wanda Jean to his grandmother, and the job feels like a betrayal. As more of this history comes to light, the novel teeters on the edge of drama but ultimately veers away from exploring this tension. In alternating first-person point of view chapters, Luke and Emmett parse their tumultuous summer with a pinch too much editorializing to ring true. Could-be-complex mosaics of character development end up more paint-by-numbers. The leading characters are White; Emmett’s new friends and co-workers, one Chinese American and one Black, embody other country music outliers as they fight alongside him for representation.

Stifled by the weight of its own good intentions, the story struggles to maintain a human spark.