But because this is DeForge, the metaphor for growing up involves the whole world transforming into reedy, sensitive “trees” and unevolved, primitive “twigs.” Half of the book is an abstract art–influenced attempt to describe what it would be like to see the world with heightened and altered senses the other half is a more archetypal coming-of age-story. When his parents take in a new lodger, April, Adam suddenly (and literally) discovers a new world that was in front of him all along. Adam is a gay high school junior enduring bullying and an indifferent boyfriend, both presented in a bleak tableau opening the book. Like Ant Colony and First Year Healthy, Big Kids is a testimony to the harshness and beauty of being alive.DeForge’s work-Ant Colony, First Year Healthy-is often aloof and disturbing, and both those qualities are present here, but they’re mixed with overt empathy for his alienated, restless cast the result is perhaps his most completely realized narrative to date. And slowly, the boy begins to change, too.Įerie and perfectly paced, DeForge's Big Kids muses on the complicated, and often contradictory, feelings people struggle with during adolescence, the choices we make to fit in, and the ways we survive times of change. Instead, he hangs out with April and her friends, a bunch of highly evolved big kids who spend their days at the campus swimming pool.

The boy's own interests quickly fade away: he stops engaging in casual sex, taking drugs, and testing the limits of socially acceptable (and legal) behavior. She's a college student, mysterious and cool, and she quickly takes a shine to the boy.

When the boy's uncle, a police officer, gets kicked out of the family's basement apartment and transferred to the countryside, April moves in. It follows a troubled teenage boy through the transformative years of high school as he redefines his friends, his interests, and his life path.

Teenage misfits and adolescent rabble-rousing take center stage in this dark coming-of-age taleīig Kids is simultaneously Michael DeForge's most straightforward narrative and his most complex work to date.

Big Kids by Michael DeForge