The Straight Road to Kylie

Even when Jonathan is making colossally bad decisions-a none-too-infrequent occurrence-it is easy to like the Kylie Minogue-obsessed, gay high school student who is at the center of Medina's debut novel. In the fun, if somewhat contrived, premise, a rich, popular classmate makes Jonathan an offer he cannot refuse: ""All I had to do was pretend to be Laura Schulberg's boyfriend, and I'd get to see Kylie Minogue-the queen of pop, the Australian Madonna, one of the loves of my life-in London!"" But the return to the closet grows complicated: Jonathan fights with his friends (one of whom drunkenly asks him to have sex with her), meets a potential first boyfriend and suspects Laura may actually be in love with him. Medina paints a vivid picture of Jonathan and his suburban world, which includes house parties, a mundane job at Target and dancing to Kylie while driving around in his dilapidated Volvo-the more ordinary aspects of his Orlando life make it somewhat easy to understand why he'd go along with this artifice. There are great moments, such as Jonathan's description of his first trip to a gay club (""It was surreal, dancing there in a sea of shaking bodies, surrounded by hundreds of other gay men, who maybe at some point in their life felt just like I did.""), but in the end, like a lot of pop music, there is more style than substance. Ages 14-up.