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A review by rebeccacider
The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio
5.0
If you'd asked me to imagine the book that invented the shounen-ai genre, I never could have imagined The Heart of Thomas. This beautifully drawn story of love and loss in a German boarding school is hauntingly dark and compulsively readable.
The story is melodramatic, but the characters have a gritty reality, and their suffering never feels romanticized or fan service-y. Instead, The Heart of Thomas convincingly portrays adolescent experiences of isolation, attraction, and identity and tells a poignant story of surviving trauma. Yes, there are cute boys kissing, but that is decidedly not the point.
Writers of contemporary LGBT fiction for young adults should definitely look back to this classic.
The story is melodramatic, but the characters have a gritty reality, and their suffering never feels romanticized or fan service-y. Instead, The Heart of Thomas convincingly portrays adolescent experiences of isolation, attraction, and identity and tells a poignant story of surviving trauma. Yes, there are cute boys kissing, but that is decidedly not the point.
Writers of contemporary LGBT fiction for young adults should definitely look back to this classic.