LEAVE ME NOT ALONE

A young gay man confronts his town and its history in the fourth novel in the Croy Cycle series.

It’s 1970, the summer before basketball star Jake Jacobs’ senior year, and he’s just passed on a chance to spend it in Paris, France, with his thespian mother. Instead, he wants to remain in Croy, Oklahoma, where he moved two years ago. Things aren’t quite what they used to be—his friend and old crush, Randy Edom, hasn’t been around since he graduated and inherited a large sum of money—but Jake’s best pal, Joanie Tibbits, is still around. He also has a new flame, Beau Hamilton, a sensitive musician who enjoys secretly wearing women’s undergarments. Together with other friends, Jake and Beau form a rock band called the Quirks—a nod to its members’ idiosyncrasies—and find cathartic musical expression for their angst. Joanie, the editor of the school paper, launches an investigation into a controversial sculpture that once adorned the local library. Why was it removed, and what became of it? Randy returns home to take care of his ailing mother, Virginia, and come to terms with some family history that he’s ignored for too long. The era’s cultural upheavals also begin to manifest in the town’s social life: Young men are coming home from Vietnam with unspoken horror stories locked up in their injured bodies, and many in Croy are unwilling to accept loves and lifestyles that don’t conform to conservative Christian morality. Jake has just one year left in town, but is that enough time to put its ghosts to rest?

Over the course of this novel, Ceci effectively infuses the prose with the well-developed personalities of its characters, as when Randy visits his sick mother: “Virginia smiled like she’d just awoken from a good dream. She waved one of her IV lines. ‘You look like you could use some of this.’ ‘Does it kill the pain?’ ‘No. It just sets it in a corner.’ ” At another point, the work gets across the exuberance that the characters feel when performing music: “Jake grinned and covered his ears. Belle looked like she was howling, but he couldn’t hear her.” Although the previous two books in the series worked well as stand-alone YA novels, this one relies more heavily on storylines established in the earlier volumes; as such, fans of the Croy Cycle are sure to appreciate this latest entry, but new readers would do well to catch up with previous books first. Overall, it feels less like a standard YA tale than a larger story of small-town life and the interactions of families that have deep, interconnected roots. As in the previous entries, there’s a queer coming-of-age storyline, but here, it’s somewhat diluted by other, less urgent plotlines. For example, the library sculpture seems to hold a lot of metaphorical weight, but the reader may have trouble getting too invested in its fate. (Crosby’s occasional black-and-white line drawings feature characters and objects from the text.)

A less-focused but affecting installment about earnest Southern teens.