Somebody has taken a key to the metal of his locker and scratched a slur into it, deep enough that it will not come off and public enough that a crowd has gathered to point. He says nothing to the principal, having worked out by now that it is pointless. He goes home. and he comes back the next morning before anyone else, opens his bag in an empty corridor, and adds two words to what is already there: and proud. Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez is a novel about three seventeen-year-olds in a Virginia high school, and that moment, two-thirds through, is the closest any of them comes to winning anything.
A Boy With Nothing Left to Hide
Three narrators take a chapter each, in the same order throughout: the closeted basketball player, the quiet swimmer in love with him, and Nelson, out since middle school and dressing like it. Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez sells itself on the first two. It belongs to the third.
Nelson is loud, funny, vain, cruel when frightened, and by some distance the most alive person on the page. He dyes his hair green, gets a perm, shaves it off. He hands out badges from his mother’s parents’ group. and he answers a bully with a line so good that even the friend he has just endangered laughs about it later. and he is also the only one of the three who is hit, spat at, shouted at and threatened as a matter of routine, and has been since he was five.
What Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez Costs Its Loudest Character
The novel then does something a lot of readers will find hard, and which is the reason this book is worth a group’s time rather than just its respect. It makes the bravest character the one it punishes.
Nelson is in love with his best friend and told plainly that the feeling is not returned. He tries a clumsy pass and gets an accidental elbow in the jaw for it. An older boy he idolises takes him to a car, starts something, stops on discovering he is a virgin and under eighteen, and kindly tells him to save it for someone who matters. His father promises to visit, then does not, then telephones later only to explain that everything is Nelson’s own fault.
That is the evening on which he opens a chat window, meets a man of twenty-nine, and goes to his flat by himself. Nothing is used. He finds out afterwards that the man has a partner. He is blocked by morning.
What follows is the best sustained writing in the book: a week in a dark bedroom, junk food and cigarettes, a shaved head under a pulled-down hat, and a boy who cannot make himself say it out loud. When he finally tells his mother, her anger has a target he does not expect, and it lands on the days he waited rather than the night itself.
What Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez Does With Two Parents
Against that, the coming-out thread is almost gentle, and unsentimental about how slowly adults move. Kyle tells his mother because she has found something in his room, then tells his father across the dinner table the same night, which is either courage or momentum.
Neither parent throws him out. Both are hopeless for weeks. His mother asks whether she did something wrong when he was small and whether the groups that promise change might work. His father decides it is a decision and says so more than once, then telephones the school about the harassment without being asked, and ends up suggesting a parents’ meeting himself. Nobody in this family has a revelation. They wear each other down, which is more useful to read.
Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez and the Father Who Leaves
The third strand is the one adult the book refuses to redeem. Jason’s father is a drinker and a hitter, and the novel is careful to show the machinery around him: a wife at a support group for families of alcoholics, a small daughter who covers her ears in a doorway, a teenager who has learned to cross a room unnoticed.
The confrontation takes one line and one punch, and the father packs a bag and goes. Whether that is earned is the sharpest disagreement a group can have about this book. It is enormously satisfying. It also arrives very fast for something that has been described as ten years old.
Where the Book Strains
The strict rotation costs it. Because the order never varies, one or two chapters are plainly waiting for their narrator to matter again.
The girlfriend is a device. Lied to, then lashing out, then reappearing on cue to forgive, and never once given an inside.
The adults sort neatly into allies and obstacles, with the art teacher and one mother beyond criticism and the principal a coward until the plot requires otherwise.
You can feel the syllabus. Each chapter tends to carry one topic, all of them handled accurately, and the sequencing shows.
The technology and the politics are firmly of 2001, which dates the furniture without touching the machinery.
Groups wanting more should try John of John by Douglas Stuart for a boy in a town that has decided what he is, or We Burned So Bright by T.J. Klune, which is far warmer about the same age. The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan suits anyone who came to Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez for the friendship rather than the romance, and the guide to young adult tropes is useful homework on how many of these patterns started here.
For the Group
Start with the ending the book withholds. Nelson is tested and monitored, a member of his youth group stands up and discloses that he is living with HIV, and the novel closes without telling us Nelson’s result. Is that a cop-out, or the only honest option, given what a reassuring answer would do to everything the story has just said about risk?
Then the hierarchy of courage. The boy who hides gets the romance, the scholarship and the last chapter. The boy who never hid gets beaten up, exploited, abandoned by his father, dropped by his closest friend, and left in medical limbo. Is the book aware of that arrangement, or reproducing it?
Then the club. Two students fight their principal to start a gay-straight alliance, and one of them says plainly at the parents’ committee that it makes no difference to him because he graduates in a few months. He is doing it for whoever arrives next. Does that argument work on your group, and would it have worked on your own school?
One practical note, because this 2001 novel carries a heavy load. Expect slurs on nearly every page; a street attack that leaves one boy with a sprained wrist and another with a split lip; a drunk father who hits his own child; an eating disorder written without euphemism; thoughts of suicide; HIV testing, and a character who lives with the virus; an encounter in which nobody protects a seventeen-year-old from an adult who knew better; and a love scene that stops short of explicit.
Where It Leaves You
The trilogy continues with Rainbow High and then Rainbow Road, so nothing here is final, but the last page of Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez is a good one: a conference room, a first meeting, a handful of boys loitering outside to see who dares go in, and one of the three with his hand on the door, entirely free to turn round.
What stays is not the milestone. It is a six-year-old deciding for herself what the word means and offering her brother a definition warmer than any adult in the book manages. It is a swimmer who wears the same cap for twenty-one chapters and forgets it somewhere on the twenty-second. And it is a boy shaving his own head in a bathroom because it is the only thing left that he controls. Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez was a first of its kind and would be easy to praise politely and shelve. It is better than that, and the reason is Nelson.
The copy came from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, sent in exchange for an honest opinion and nothing else. Which seems worth saying in a review of this book in particular: the publisher supplied the novel, the same way somebody else supplies the locker. Neither of them gets to choose what goes on it.