PLAYING WITH MATCHES
by Brian Katcher
A loner goes from hero to zero after dating and dumping the school outcast. When 17-year-old self-professed nerd Leon Sanders is paired for a class project with Melody Hennon, a classmate whose face has been disfigured from a childhood burn accident, he discovers they share a passion for Monty Python, The Twilight Zone and fan fiction. The two quickly fall into a comfortable relationship, despite Leon’s reservations about Melody’s scars. But when beautiful, popular Amy Green starts giving him come-hither glances, Leon trades in love for looks, only to realize too late he may have lost his soul mate. Katcher realistically plumbs the depths of the tortured teenage male soul (“What if they both had pig faces? Then my choice would be easy”) while tempering Leon’s internal angst with plenty of laughs (“The following Monday I didn’t wake up as a billionaire playboy secret agent, so I was forced to return to school”). In the spirit of Chris Crutcher’s Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes (1993) and David Yoo’s Girls for Breakfast (2005), this tender, funny debut is “dude lit” at its best. (Fiction. YA)