After being outed as non-binary at his previous school, Riley suffered bullying and pressure from parents who didn’t want him near their kids. Then his best friend Azure committed suicide and Riley was so distraught he missed his finals. Now he has transferred to Lake High, the same school that Azure had attended. There’s a newly formed Gay-Straight Alliance club that Riley has volunteered to help run. He think the club is just a gesture from the school after their “token gay boy” Azure killed himself but Riley wants to fit in and to find his place. At his new school Riley meets up with Zane, the straight boy with whom Azure was besotted. Their relationship develops but Riley still wants to know what pushed Azure to take his own life. Zane is struggling with his own problems and as Riley grows closer to Zane’s former friend, Sam, he begins to wonder for how much longer he can keep everything bottled up inside.

Lyric C. Faulder’s I DON’T LIKE BLUE is a beautifully nuanced debut novel. It deals with a number of difficult subjects including homophobia, abuse, bullying and suicide. The story is told using alternating first person narratives with chapters split between the perspectives of Zane and Riley. Both are haunted by the metaphorical ghost of their friend Azure. As Riley states when catching a glimpse of something that reminds him of his dead friend, “And Azure dies all over again. Now, all that’s left of him is the color blue, haunting me in every room and every sky. He’s everywhere, but always just out of reach. Gone.”

By positioning Riley as the vice-president of the Gay-Straight Alliance, Faulder enables discussion of subjects such as dead naming and preferred pronouns (the author uses they/their) to be seamlessly integrated into the plot. Important aspects of queer identity can be highlighted without having to resort to main characters engaging in antagonistic actions with each other purely for the sake of platforming or debating wider issues. Faulder’s characterization are more sophisticated than that. There are no gay/ straight stereotypes. Each character is fully drawn, believable, human, flaws and all. Aside from its strengths as a novel about sexuality and identity, I DON’T LIKE BLUE works as a classic romance and Riley and Zane’s relationship is the key. As Faulder writes of them in one of numerous exquisite passages “Months pass like minutes when you’re living in a dream. We soar through the days together, never a question between us.”

I DON’T LIKE BLUE by Lyric C. Faulder is a bold and beautifully written YA novel about the difficulties of young love and struggles with queer identity and acceptance that will tug at a reader’s heart.

~Kent Lane for IndieReader