Wide Awake (novel)

Her family were nonbelievers until, while her father was out of work and her mother was undergoing treatment for cancer, they attended church with Mandy's aunt.

Alongside running mate Alice Martinez, Stein won a tight race by the mere margin of 1,000 Kansas votes, signalling a watershed for progressive politics, which take the limelight for the first time in decades.

Although the lives of American homosexuals are drastically improved even before Stein's election, what and the country is in the main far more liberal, it remains divided along acute political lines: as Hoffman notes, "the pendulum has merely swung slightly to the left, thanks to voters fed up with economic inequality, ongoing health crises and a politically motivated 'War to End All Wars' against 'extremists everywhere.

Hoffman praised in particular its skilful mingling of the political with the personal, going so far as to draw comparisons with John Fox's The Boys on the Rock, although he noted dissimilarities that were far more conspicuous: "Just 22 years separate these books, but the worlds they inhabit seem impossibly distant.

"[1] Hoffman was not entirely impressed, though: Predicting trends — particularly regarding teenagers' fashions and slang — is difficult, and Levithan sometimes stumbles.

It's hard to imagine even politically aware teens flocking to a "non-mall," where anti-consumers shop for items they'd like to buy, only to forgo those purchases and donate to charity the cash they could have spent on themselves.

"[1]"But," he noted, "if minor details ring false, the major elements of Wide Awake seem essentially plausible.

Levithan outlines a world of new possibilities for gay Americans, without positing a utopia where homophobia has vanished and the entire country has changed political orientation.

But on a deeper level, it is a story about what might be possible "in the near future" for young gay adults, for social activists and, indeed, for America.

[1] "Progressive activists have long asserted that the personal is political," wrote Hoffman in his review for The Washington Post.

"[1] He went on to observe that, whereas in Fox's The Boys on the Rock, the main political character was in the eyes of the protagonist only a politician, "Duncan sees in Stein a reflection of himself.