The Vast Fields of Ordinary is a young adult gay novel by American author Nick Burd first published in 2009.
[2] Booklist added the novel to its Rainbow List 2010, a bibliography of young adult books which include significant gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or questioning content.
[4] On the basis of this novel, Out named author Nick Burd to the "OUT 100," a list of 100 people who made important contributions to LGBTQ culture and politics in 2009.
His father, Ned, sells luxury automobiles and his mother, Peggy, is an art teacher at a local Roman Catholic parochial school.
Ned, too, is alienated from his family, and has begun taking poetry classes at a local community college.
Dade is a loner whose only friend is Pablo Soto, a Mexican American who is Cedarville high school's star quarterback for the football team.
As the school year ends, Dade attends a party hosted by the pretty Jessica Montana and her awkward, less-pretty twin sister Francesca (whom everyone belittles by calling "Fessica").
He meets Alex, and under the pretense of securing some marijuana, the two teens take a trip into the countryside that evening to obtain drugs from a man named Dingo.
After a night of binge drinking by the family swimming pool, Dade has a dream (or possibly a hallucination) where he sees Jenny Moore, a nine-year-old girl whose disappearance has dominated the local television and radio news for weeks.
A terrible accident brings the novel to a sudden close and forces Dade to end his wonderful summer.
The novel depicts homosexual encounters (one review called these descriptions PG-13), marijuana smoking, underage consumption of alcohol, and hangovers.
The New York Times found the novel "fascinating and dreamy...filled with characters who are extraordinary to a degree that the reader wants to know more, even about the most minor ones.
"[9] The review praised Burd's use of language and metaphor, and called the work "the best kind of first novel—it's packed with insights that might have been carried around for years, just waiting to come out.
"[9] Michael Cart, reviewer at Booklist, was highly laudatory: "...Burd is a terrific writer with a special gift for creating teenage characters who are vital, plausible, and always engaging (even when they're being mean and menacing).
His take on the complications in Dade's life is sophisticated and thoughtful, especially on the ambiguities of that 'relationship' with Pablo, while his limning of the growing friendship with Alex is deeply satisfying, never striking a discordant emotional note.
"[10] A review in The Plain Dealer found that Burd "writes incisively about the anxiety of severing relationships and fleeing a dead-end town, a reality playing out daily across the Midwest.
"[8] The School Library Journal listed The Vast Fields of Ordinary as one of 11 novels for LGBTQ teens published in 2009 that had strong characters and candid writing, and concluded that it "beg[s] to be invited into a surprising variety of classroom discussions..."[11] Some reviews of the book were critical however.
Booklist, while generally praising the novel, also criticized the work for being a "traditional coming-out-while-coming-of-age story," and found the missing-girl subplot unsatisfying.