Something Different

It seems as though more and more, I'm hearing about established writers revisiting their earlier books to "tell the story from a different character's perspective." Generally, it sounded to me somewhere between a hacky short cut and a glorified writing exercise. But I was never really in a position to give one a try; whenever I'd heard about such a book, it was from a writer I'd never read, revisiting a book I never had interest in.

Then I read Something Like Summer, a novel covering a decade in a young man's life, and two very different men he falls in love with. I found it an enjoyable (and sometimes bittersweet) read. I liked it enough to plan on coming back to its author, Jay Bell, at a later point. As it turns out, Something Like Summer was the first of a series, and the next two volumes of it are exactly what I'd been suspicious but curious about -- a retelling of the same events, each book from the perspective of one of the two different love interests in the first book.

Book two is titled Something Like Winter. It's centered on a young man named Tim Wyman, and the high school romance he falls into with Ben Bentley. Tim is deeply in the closet -- initially to himself just as much as to anyone else -- and this ultimately sabotages their relationship. Only when Tim heads off to college does he learn to accept himself, but by then it's too late. He can only wonder about "the one who got away," as new emotional challenges keep coming.

I did say when I read the previous book in this series that I'd been on the hunt for a book with a gay protagonist that isn't a coming out story. It's not that I'm over that type of story altogether; I just wasn't particularly interested in it at the time. But I knew that Something Like Winter was going to be exactly that, a coming out story. Knowing that from the outset, I went in with my eyes open.

As for the gimmick of the perspective shift? Well, the gimmick actually doesn't feel much like a gimmick. This book doesn't really trade on any reader knowledge from the first; if for some reason you were to read this one first, you wouldn't be lost, or sense anything incomplete or missing. This book stands alone on its own merits.

It achieves this in several different ways. First, the author does a good job of not replaying too many scenes from the first book directly. The majority of the book is new material, both with previously established characters and without, and often entwined carefully with the original story. Jay Bell leans strongly into the perspective of his new main character, and from that comes a logical shift in attitude about what events are significant enough to make it into this story.

Even on the occasions when scenes are repeated, the shift in viewpoint freshens them up. The main character here, Tim, is arguably a villain in the first book. At the very least, he isn't very sympathetic. Jay Bell sets quite the challenge for himself to "redeem" Tim, but it's mostly effective.

Here and there, you will find an awkward turn of phrase that's trying a little too hard. The novel is at its most effective when it simply puts the reader squarely with Tim's fears about coming out, when it's more raw and visceral than considered and polished.

Something Like Winter is not quite as effective a book overall as the previous one, but I still found it to be mostly successful. I'd give it a B. The "exercise" of the perspective shift was effective enough that I'll probably take a shot at book three (told from the perspective of the third character in the "love triangle").

(Hmmm.... has anyone ever tried this "perspective shift" gimmick in a non-romantic context? That I'd be very interested to read.)