Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

Will Grayson, Will Grayson is the story of two high school kids that meet by coincidence and discover that they both have the same name. Authored by young adult fiction mega-stars John Green and David Levithan, the narration alternates between the two boys as they both try to navigate the difficult tangle of friendships, romances, and self-discovery that goes on in adolescence.

The first Will Grayson that we meet, authored by John Green, starts his narration by describing his friend Tiny Cooper. Tiny is an ironic nickname, because Tiny is a gigantic kid that plays on the school football team. He is also gay, a fact that Will elaborates on extensively throughout the novel. His description on the very first page of chapter one reads, "Tiny Cooper is not the world's gayest person, and he is not the world's largest person, but I believe he may be the world's largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world's gayest person who is really, really large." Tiny, aside from being large and gay, is also a serial romantic, having moved through several boyfriends throughout his lifetime. He is also an aspiring playwright. He's written a musical about himself and his past boyfriends and at the beginning of the novel he receives funding and permission to produce it at his school. Right from the outset, Tiny is really the main focus of the first Will's narration.

What Will doesn't talk a whole lot about in his chapters is himself. He explains that once he wrote a letter to the school newspaper defending Tiny and his right to be a gay person in a boys locker room. Doing this ended up being the biggest regret of his life due to all the unwanted attention and ridicule from his peers that this act brought to him. From that point on, Will tries to live his life by two simple rules: 1. Don't care too much about anything, and 2. Shut up. Trying to live by these rules ends up making Will's life feel quite empty and most of his character arc is about how he learns that these are not, in fact, good rules. His self-imposed aloofness has made him lonely and annoying to his friends. He eventually settles into a path of honesty and caring for others after a lot of internal struggling.

The second Will Grayson in the story, written by David Levithan, is quite a different character. He struggles with clinical depression, and although he takes medication to control it, he still finds it difficult to enjoy his life and interact with others. This Will lives with his single mother and isn't well-off financially. He is also gay, but in a less flamboyant way than Tiny. He hasn't come out to his mother or to his friend at school, Maura. The one bright spot in his life is Isaac, an online boyfriend that he has been chatting with for a year, but has never met in person before. At the beginning of the novel, he and Isaac decide to finally meet up.

When the meeting with Isaac doesn't go as expected, he happens to run into the first Will Grayson. After getting over the coincidence of them having the same name, the first Will introduces him to Tiny, whom he soon begins dating. Dating someone as uninhibited as Tiny begins to cause a big shift in Will's personality. He is able to come out to his mother and some schoolmates and begins seeing a deeper purpose for his life. Although he is happy during this time, the relationship with Tiny becomes more than he can emotionally handle. Tiny is intense with his feelings, and Will simply isn't ready to get so close to someone. His depression has left him inexperienced with handling deep emotions, and the relationship soon falls apart. The rest of his arc deals with him finding a new balance in his life, learning to put himself out in the world more, and speaking his mind.

As the two Will's barely have anything to do with each other throughout the text, the main connecting thread between the two halves of the narration is Tiny Cooper and his musical.  This was a struggle for me as a reader because I had trouble deciding if I liked Tiny as a character. In trying to create someone larger-than-life, I feel like Green and Levithan leaned a little to heavily on gay stereotypes. Making him be a flamboyant, theater-loving, overly-dramatic person who ALSO happens to be huge and play football may not be enough to rescue him from being somewhat problematic. I felt like the second Will was a much better depiction of a gay teenager, but there is no one "correct way" for gay people to be, obviously. I just felt like there was something off with Tiny.

I also struggled a bit with the plot of the novel, because, well...not a whole lot happens. Much of the action takes place inside the heads of both Wills and consists of a lot of whining about how life is unfair and confusing. This is definitely realistic to the teenage experience, but it wasn't presented in a way that was engaging to me. I wasn't pulled into this story and finished reading it relatively quickly just because I wanted to get through it.

There was also an issue of balance going on. I found the second Will's chapters to be much more interesting than the first Will's. The back and forth narration technique is really only effective if both characters are equally compelling, which they weren't. The first Will's problem was that he needed to pull his head out of his butt, while the second Will was struggling with much larger issues like his mental illness and his sexuality. I found myself consistently impatient to return to his story. The first Will was a bit boring - a disappointing discovery for me, as I usually enjoy John Green's work.

The novel culminates with the first performance of Tiny's musical, which both Wills attend. At this point, the boys have grown up a bit and are in better places emotionally and socially. They arrange a stunt to show their appreciation for Tiny's friendship, which they now realize was an invaluable help to both of them. I really didn't find their gesture to be as clever or charming as the authors of this work certainly did. In fact, I didn't even find it to be something that would be possible or logical for the situation. The novel ends on a muddled and overly-sentimental message about the importance of honesty in relationships which didn't quite tug at my heartstrings in the way it was meant to.

Ultimately, I found Will Grayson, Will Grayson to be only okay. It was funny and poignant in parts, but it lacked the emotional punch that I was expecting two authors of John Green and David Levithan's caliber to be packing. This was my Popsugar Challenge selection for the "novel written by more than one author" category. Novels written by more than one person have the potential to be amazing and creative works, such as All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, which I read last year and absolutely loved. The issue with Will Grayson, Will Grayson was that it just didn't have enough of a story to tell. I think this was a fun project for the two authors to collaborate on, but in the end, the ultimate meaning of the novel was vague. This modern coming of age story was bland and forgettable.

Challenge Tally
Popsugar Challenge: (A book with multiple authors) 3/40 
Mount TBR: previously owned 3/60