Five Star Review: Trailer Trash by Marie Sexton

Title: Trailer Trash

Author: Marie Sexton

Publisher/GR Link: Riptide, GR

Genre: MM, 1980’s

Vice: Coming Out, New Adult

Rating: 5 Stars

Lock this book up: 4 keys.  The sex is hot and totally supports the plot line.

Length: Novel

Satisfaction: HEA

Cover Impressions: I love it.

Best Line: “If the world didn’t suck, we’d fall off.”

Synopsis: It’s 1986, and what should have been the greatest summer of Nate Bradford’s life goes sour when his parents suddenly divorce. Now, instead of spending his senior year in his hometown of Austin, Texas, he’s living with his father in Warren, Wyoming, population 2,833 (and Nate thinks that might be a generous estimate). There’s no swimming pool, no tennis team, no mall—not even any MTV. The entire school’s smaller than his graduating class back home, and in a town where the top teen pastimes are sex and drugs, Nate just doesn’t fit in.

Then Nate meets Cody Lawrence. Cody’s dirt-poor, from a broken family, and definitely lives on the wrong side of the tracks. Nate’s dad says Cody’s bad news. The other kids say he’s trash. But Nate knows Cody’s a good kid who’s been dealt a lousy hand. In fact, he’s beginning to think his feelings for Cody go beyond friendship.

Admitting he might be gay is hard enough, but between small-town prejudices and the growing AIDS epidemic dominating the headlines, a town like Warren, Wyoming, is no place for two young men to fall in love.

Impressions: I love Marie Sexton’s writing, and so I was very excited to see this upcoming release.  I couldn’t have anticipated how much I would love it!

Sexton does something amazing with the setting in this book.  She really captures the tones and attitudes to homosexuality, especially in a small town, and particularly in the dawn of the AIDS epidemic.  The hopelessness and isolation that Cody lives with is only exacerbated by the perceptions of his own sexuality.  Though I came out a few years after this, the attitudes towards homosexuality and the inextricable link to AIDs was very reminiscent to my own gay coming-of-age.

Cody and Nate were the driving force in this story, and Sexton did an amazing job of crafting two very different young men who, for very different reasons, found themselves alone and misunderstood.  Nate is a fish out of water in Wyoming, and when he finds Cody, who is alone in the midst of a sea of fish, they are immediately drawn to each other. 

This story definitely broke my heart at a few points.  Cody suffers so much, and his strength in the face of some of his challenges really touched me.  I ended the novel with a smile on my face, and the feeling that this was one of those rare, perfect stories that I will cherish and revisit.

Highly Recommended