Jeffrey Ricker's THE UNWANTED

I’ve been waiting for this book to come out for some time now. Despite my forty some years, I still love YA fantasy and haven’t seen that many quality LGBT YA fantasies come out that captured my attention. I’ve liked Jeffrey Ricker’s short fiction for a while now and was excited to see what he would do with the genre, so when Bold Strokes Books made this available on Net Galley for early review, I gobbled it up.

Jamie is a short, physically-underdeveloped teenager who happens to be the sole out gay kid at his high school (in the role of Jamie I kept envisioning Josh Hutcherson from his Cirque du Freak days – for his height, just his height; nothing else, I swear). After a particularly rotten day at school, he comes home to find that his mother, who he thought was dead, is actually alive. And an Amazon. Having been dumped on his father’s doorstep sixteen years earlier, he now learns that he may be the only one who can save the Amazon race.

Sounds like the son of Diana Prince and Steve Trevor gets his own spinoff comic book, right? It’s not. It’s way cooler than that. And besides, Jamie’s mom doesn’t even own an invisible jet. She owns an invisible winged horse.

Ricker created a fun, action-packed, thoughtful novel that kept me page-turning all the way to the poignant ending. He invested his characters with such warmth and charm that watching them work through their personal struggles was engrossing. He also didn’t gloss over the difficult consequences for the choices they made.

Considering the subject matter, I expected the book to be grander in scope than it was (what with the Amazons, gods, prophecies, oracles, and the like), but Ricker somehow kept the action on a low simmer for most of the book, and focused instead on the story unfolding between Jamie, his parents, his best friend, and a school bully, so that when he did go all epic on us toward the end it had a much larger impact. That isn’t to say that the book is slow. On the contrary, it moves quickly and Ricker sucks you in with Jamie’s narrative and wicked sense of humor. There was just a quiet intensity beneath the surface that he cleverly held on to as long as possible until it boiled over.

One of the things that I was particularly taken with was Ricker’s ability to maintain a light mood despite all the turmoil that Jamie experienced. His personal struggles with the lies his father had told about his mother’s absence and the bullying he received at school for being gay ran the risk of turning the story maudlin. But Ricker didn’t fall into those easy traps. Despite Jamie’s struggles, he kept the mood light while still giving sufficient gravitas to Jamie’s personal journey.

One of the other major selling points for me was the parental/adult characters in the book. Normally, in YA fiction they tend to take a backseat to the teenagers and are there either as the villain or to throw roadblocks in the way of the action or provide sage advice at just the right moment (in those “mwa-mwa mwa-mwa” Peanuts’ voices). Not these folks. They got down and dirty and were as invested in the action as Jamie and his friends. Ricker also cleverly rounded out the cast with enough supporting roles so that you weren’t sure who to trust until the big reveals later in the book.

Jeffrey Ricker’s The Unwanted is a real winner. If you pick it up, you’re lucky. It’s a YA novel that deserves all the attention it garners.