It seemed like I didn’t stop running till I found him the next day in school
It’s Sunday, yes, but it’s also Pride Month which is why
this weekend’s book of choice is Sprout by Dale Peck, an insanely witty
and descriptive little essay (as it seems to be) on the highs and lows of one
Daniel Bradford: 16 years old, green-haired, gay, and new to Kansas.
The events of his life, on a surface level, are fairly
relatable teenage things: adjusting to life without a mother, in a new city,
while trying to come to terms with his own sexuality, but Sprout, as he is nicknamed, isn’t just an
ordinary teenager – which in some ways still makes him relatable to me. He
finds enjoyment in words – touting a dictionary the way anyone else would their
mobile phone or purse – and this pairs expertly with his personality to make
for a mature yet colloquial and intimate read. Much like my last entry on Laini
Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone series (which you can read here), there are often dense
sections of description for each character. This, in addition to Sprout’s sporadic
asides and digressions – which, at times can give you whiplash and make the
story seem more like conversation than composition – almost make you believe
you’re standing right beside him like an imaginary friend. Due to his love of synonyms,
everyone is uniquely depicted from his writing coach, Mrs Miller’s ‘[w]ispy
bangs […] tortured with repeated applications of curling iron and hairspray in
clear violation of the Geneva Convention’ to his friend Ruthie whose body is ‘tall
and thin as a periscope poking from the waves’. Understandably, his father
doesn’t get so much a physical description as a character exposé,
from his perpetual drunkenness to his collection of tree stumps and vines. And
sometimes just a few lines of dialogue are sufficient to display a character
such as the gym teacher Mr Balzer, singling Sprout out for not wearing the
proper gym gear while obnoxiously shouting ‘Yo, Abernathy, wassup my man!’ to
another student. But the real description begins when he meets Ty, the boy he
falls in love with; suddenly everything they see and do together seems like
pure poetry.
When they first meet, it is during a game of touch football,
and by the end, having been pelted with every ball in the sports hall, Ty is
left looking like a ‘human-shaped flame’ surrounded by balls ‘like a field of psychedelic
mushrooms’. During their first out of school meeting, Sprout is so tense with
uncertainty that ‘[t]he silence was so loud the leaves bumping against each
other sounded like a thirty-car pileup on the highway’. And the way he
describes their first kiss – ‘the naked breath of the forest air felt ice cold
on my lips, and all I wanted to do was pull him back on me. So I did’ – it made
my heart melt. In fact, Ty’s very character is the most colourful of them all –
and that’s not forgetting that Sprout has green hair! – he’s creative,
innovative, childish, scarred, and strong. He stands up for Sprout, endures his
father’s beatings just to see him, and even then you’re still not 100% sure if
he’s gay too. But it’s ok because Sprout seems to love him all the same. One
scene in particular seems to solidify this when, after having sex, he must lick
all the green hair dye smudges from Ty’s skin – lest Ty’s father find out – and
yet he proclaims ‘I’d’ve painted his whole body green if I could have, just to
let the world know he was mine.’ You get so caught up in their romance, along
with Sprout’s convoluted streams of consciousness, that you seem to be caught
short by any moments of tension and seriousness which belie the potential for a
less-than-happy ending (which, by the way, is very open-ended, though I won’t
say why).
I don’t remember the specifics of how this book came into my
possession, but I have re-read it so many times now because it is just so
unique, funny and, dare I say, even a little adorable. It’s kind of like a
kaleidoscope really – if I wanted to employ some Sprout-like literary devices:
from the outside it seems fairly unassuming (aside from the green hair poking
in from the edge of the cover); you read the blurb and think you know what to
expect (I mean, hey, it’s just a kaleidoscope, right?) but when you look
inside, it’s a whole other world that keeps shifting, defying expectations, and
sometimes taking you by surprise – especially with the direct asides which seem
to know what you’re thinking. (‘Get you mind out of the gutter!’) I would
readily take the advice which is given and read this book over and over again,
if it weren’t for the fact that I have other reviews to do, because it’s so different
from the usual fantasy/sci-fi stories I invest myself in, and it’s so goddamn honest,
bizarre, and wholesome. If you need a good coming-out story, please don’t miss
this one.
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