Out of the Shadows

If you're a person who hates people who are gay or lesbian, then you don't want to read this book. This book is only for the kind of people who are open-minded enough and tolerant enough to realize that some people live a different life-style than other people, and it doesn't automatically make them bad people.

There are a number of characters in the book. Rowanna, known as Ro, lives with a woman named Deb. Ro's father had left, and her mother and Deb became a couple; Deb is lesbian, and Ro's mother was either lesbian or bi-sexual. Deb is heterosexual.

Another character is Jodie, also in the 15-16-year-old age range. Jodie is definitely a lesbian and has a crush on Ro. Mark is a boy at the same school who has a crush on Jodie.

The other major character is Selina who is about as nasty a girl as you can get. She heads a group of girls that go out-of-their-way to be nasty to Jodie.

The book, then, deals with various themes:

1. The type of hatred that is directed towards people who are gay or lesbian (or transgendered or bisexual, terms which aren't used in this book.) Such hatred can take the form of verbal harassment and even physical attack, which Selina does. Understand that we are not talking dislike; we are talking pure hate here.

2. The difficulty some people, especially young people, have in accepting their own sexuality if it is other than heterosexual. This difficulty can turn towards self-hatred very, very easily. It can turn towards hatred of those who are lesbian/gay/etc. It can poison one's relationships towards other people.

3. The book also shows how the self-loathing and how the discrimination can be survived, and how people can eventually come to terms with the various issues in their lives and end up having a fairly stable and fairly happy life.

The characters in the book are done very realistically, and the story is very moving and well done. The only problems I have with the book are that it gets almost a little preachy near the end, and the fact that the book appears to be Australian in origin and there are a number of terms used in the book (terms like chasings, dobbed, dag, bludging, cack, and doopa, among others) that I don't know the meaning of and the meaning cannot always be inferred from the words usage in the sentence. (Fore example, I'm assuming that doopa is some kind of quilt or comforter, but I have no idea at all what dag means.)

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