Autoboyography

3.5/5 stars“I don't actually care if you break my heart, Sebastian. I went into this knowing it could happen and I gave it to you anyway. But I don't want you to break your own. You have so much space in your heart for your church, but does it have space for you?”
Let's just start this review with a disclosure, shall we?

A main theme of this book is the Mormon/LDS religion. Now I am a very proud, tapir-loving exmormon, meaning I was raised and baptized in the LDS church before realizing that the venn diagram of my beliefs and the LDS church's beliefs were two circles on opposite sides of the universe. Sprinkle in some historical inaccuracies and sketchy and unacceptable 1800s drama Mormons try to keep hidden, I decided to go through the uber-complicated process of removing my name from LDS records. Seriously. It's complicated. Technically, I had to use a lawyer. But to get to the point, I have very negative and vocal feelings about the Mormon church. If you ever wanna hear them, I will tell you. However, this book doesn't shit on the religion, so I feel like I shouldn't either. I wanna be as respectful as possible. So I'm going to try my hardest to keep this review as objective as possible and keep my personal bias out of it, but it's gonna be hard. I like putting a little of myself in reviews, so there's a 100% chance I'm gonna fail. So if you are a practicing Mormon, maybe steer clear of this review. My apologies. I really am going to try.

So I read this book.

I liked this book. Rated it four stars.

I put this book aside and moved on to other things.

My mind, however, decided to focus on this book more than it probably should have. And upon furthur review, I realized that I didn't like this book as much as I thought I did. It had it's ups and it's downs and it's dose of instalove and fuck ups. So I lowered my rating accordingly.

So this book follows Tanner, who is bisexual and nonreligious, who's parents relocate him to Mormontown, USA and encourage him to hide his sexuality until he graduates and goes out of state for collage.

If you don't know anything about the Mormon religion, they don't really like people who aren't straight and male. They don't consider being gay a sin, but what is a sin is if you “act on your same-sex attraction” and marry/date someone of the same gender. So Tanner being bisexual isn't really accepted in Utah. Him falling in love with another Mormon boy, (enter Sebastian, who'll we'll discuss later) is a huge no-no to the Mormons.

Let's get seemingly off topic for a little bit. It will come back full circle in the end. I promise.

The other day, in fact the same day I finished this book, I was driving home from the library when I noticed a billboard on the side of the road. It was one of the electronic ones that change the ad about every ten seconds or so. I normally don't pay attention to billboards-usually I'm too busy jamming to T-Swizzle or something as I drive which was exactly what I was doing but this one caught my attention.

A little background knowledge: about two weeks ago, the Mormon President/Prophet died. It's quite a tragic thing to the Utah population. His death was the front page story in the local newspaper. Despite the fact that most Mormons have never met him, they really liked this dude for some reason. I;m not gonna blatantly state my opinion of him, but if you read this book I think you too can have a revelation and guess. Or maybe go read this obituary the New York Times wrote.

Anyways, this billboard contained a picture of the late Mormon President. It stated the year he was born and ended with 2018. The words, Rest in Peace, was written in big white letters. And I was instantly befuddled that someone out there, perhaps the Mormon Church with their member's tithing money or perhaps a LDS stranger, put up money for that billboard to be there. I found this extremely weird. However, 60.7% of the population of Utah probably don't.

Because that's the percentage of Mormon's in Utah. 60.7% of 3ish million people. And the heart of Mormon culture? Provo, Utah. Where 88% of the population (~100,000 people) are Mormon.

I feel like I'm doing a school report, googling these percentages to make sure their accurate. Gross. Let's move on from less mathy things.

So you know what else is important about Provo, Utah? It's the setting of this book.

So in this book, Tanner's parents are written to be the cool parents. The kind of parents you can confide anything too. The kind of parents that will talk to you about blow jobs at the dinner table. However, they also move their LGBTQ son to the heart of Mormonville and tell him to hide his sexuality. Then they are upset at him for wanting to date a Mormon. Statistically, 88% of the people who goes to school with are Mormon. This ain't cool with me.



But, like I've mentioned, Tanner meets super LDS Sebastian in this novel-writing workshop class of his. Sebastian is a year older, a college student, and only in the class to be a TA and help other students write an entire novel of their own. Which, by the way, seems impossible. An entire novel? In one semester? Okay... And it's literally love at first sight. When Tanner first sees Sebastian, he's instantly obssessed.

Eventually, the stars aligned for Tanner and him an Sebastian start a relationship. But Sebastian is, obviously, Mormon and his religion prevents him from accepting himself for who he is and who he likes, and angst ensues. There's a lot of breaking up and getting back together. Also add in the fact that Sebastian's parents are sooo typical Mormon it's scary. I can't even tell you how many people I've met in my life that are exactly like them. So sweet and so shitty at the same time.

I think you can either guess the rest of the book or go read it to find out.

Now I'm gonna be honest here. I wrote all that up, and I have no idea what I wrote. What points I touched on and what points I didn't. It's currently 12:05am and I'm more attentive on the episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians so I don't really feel like rereading it. To make sure I mention what I like and what I didn't like about this book, I've composed a list.

What I Like:
•Accurate portrayal of Mormons, at least the mormons I have met in my life. which is in the hundreds.
•Your religion shouldn't control who you are and who you like
•Characters were great
•Romance, when not too instalovey, was super cute and interesting
•It took place in Utah and for once I understood exactly what the characters were doing and where they were at and the cities they talked about. That's kinda cool
•it pointed out the flaws of the mormon religion without insulting it. i wish i had that self control
•but i don't oops. but that's important. the author very well could have destroyed the religion, but they realize that it is important to some people and respected it
•It kept me very entertained during a slow day at work. made the eight hours fly by much quicker.

What I Didn't Like:
•That one scene in the middle of the book that was COMPLETE BULLSHIT
•and was sooo super dramatic
•Like one character didn't go to school or answer their phone bc of it
•but then other character shows up at her house afterwards and they were like “hahaha never mind I ain't mad”
•and that concludes that
•EXCEPT WHY DID SHE MISS SCHOOL THEN
•Tanner's parents were competely shitty moving Tanner to Provo
•There's literally a very nice towns twenty miles or less away from Provo that are a lot less Mormon
•BUT WHY EVEN MOVE YOUR SON TO UTAH TO BEGIN WITH YOU ASSHOLES
•yoU GUYS HAD NICE, REASONABLE JOBS IN CA
•ASSHOLES
•also that whole “write an entire novel in one semester” class like wtf how is that even possible
•I can barely write this review, how can you expect someone younger than me to write a novel????
•Tanner's BFF Autumn
•She was annoying and unimportant. she didn't add anything to the story.
•I'm all about platonic friendships, but her relationship with Tanner was werid
•Also INSTALOVE
•I hate instalove



Anyways, this review has gotten way out of hand. Perhaps I should have written it when I was more awake. Whatever, who cares. You get my point. If ya have any questions about the MoChurch, I'll answer them for ya if ya like. I might be a little bias though. shrug emoji

Have a good day, y'all.

So angsty! I almost DNF'ed this twice before reaching 50% mark.
Love at first sight!!?!Zero smart decisions were made by all the characters.

The latter half was better but not by much. The POV shift near the end was good. Although, the story was a very different take on lgbt+ relationships and religious beliefs so 3.5 stars rounded off to 3 because my God, Tanner's dialogues were boring in the first half and Sebastian only gets a personality when we get to his POV near the end.