COMFORT ME

Three troubled teenagers find support in one another in Ceci’s second YA novel in a series.

High school sophomore Mally Jacobs recently moved to Croy, Oklahoma, and he’s not thrilled about it. He’s come to live with and assist his ailing maternal grandfather, former pastor Matthew Jacobs, and the old man’s overbearing landlady, Mrs. Oldfield. Mally’s mother grew up in Croy, but she left town 15 years ago for reasons unknown to her son. On his first day of school, Randy Edom, the center on the varsity football team, reluctantly takes Mally under his wing. Randy wants to ask out one of the school’s popular girls, but his single mother keeps pestering him to get a job to help support the household, which would leave him little free time. Still, Randy inadvertently finds himself on a date with Joanie Tibbits, the bookish daughter of the local pharmacist, and the pair, along with Mally, fall into an unlikely friendship. The two boys live next door to each other on the wrong side of town, where “the run-down house on the corner was not an aberration, but more of a signpost indicating which way they were all headed.” Randy starts working in Joanie’s father’s store, and the three teens bond over Randy’s unexpected discovery of poetry. What’s more, they find that they have romantic feelings for each other: Randy for Joanie, Joanie for Randy, and Mally for Randy, as well. The three sensitive souls provide comfort for one another in conservative-minded Croy, but the secrets they harbor—which are sure to come to light sooner or later—may tear them apart just as they’ve started to realize how much they truly need one another.

Over the course of this novel, Ceci’s prose is smooth and often lyrical, as when Mally describes the feeling of realizing that there was a word—homosexual—to describe people like him: “Once last summer he’d climbed one of the pylons behind the baseball diamond for no apparent reason, his heart racing as he got closer to the thick black cables and their murderous buzz. That feeling was nothing compared to what clamored in his heart now, making the arteries in his neck jump like rabbits.” Although the general themes of the novel are more or less timeless, the book reads, in some ways, like an artifact from a previous era. It’s set in an unspecified year in the latter half of the 20th century, and the characters often feel as if they’ve been pilfered from a 1980s high school drama. This isn’t a flaw, in and of itself, but it’s possible that readers of modern YA fiction may find that the book’s language, pacing, and personalities feel somewhat old-fashioned. Even so, Ceci does paint a moving tale of friendship and community that’s in keeping with his larger project of chronicling goings-on in the slow-moving town of Croy. (The novel also includes simple, black-and-white illustrations by Crosby.)

A well-crafted tale of the troubles of high school life, told in a slightly antiquated style.