Product Description

It is 1978 in the Twin Cities, and Kevin Doyle, a high school senior, is a marginal student in love with keggers, rock and roll, and-unbeknownst to anyone else-a boy in his class with thick eyelashes and a bad attitude. His mother Eileen died two years earlier when her car plunged into the icy waters of the Mississippi River, and since then Kevin's relationship with his father Patrick has become increasingly distant. As lonely women vie for his father's attention, Kevin discovers Patrick's own closely guarded secret: he had planned to abandon his family for another woman. More disturbingly, his mother's death may well have been a suicide, not an accident.

Complicating the family dynamic is the constant meddling of Kevin's outspoken Aunt Nora-who will never forgive Patrick for Eileen's death-along with Patrick's inability to stay single for very long. His loyalties divided between his father and his aunt, between his internal reality and his public persona, Kevin is forced to reevaluate his notions of family and love as painful truths emerge about both.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #126187 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A gay high school senior struggles to cope with his father's irresponsibility in Malloy's poignant, quietly effective debut, set in Minneapolis in the late '70s. From the outside looking in, protagonist Kevin Doyle seems like a normal, party-happy 17-year-old, but the combination of a troubled family life and his secret crush on one of his best friends definitely sets him apart from the pack. The family issues revolve around his dad, Pat, an ordinary 40-something widower with plenty of romantic prospects as the book opens. But Kevin is furious when he learns that Pat's infidelity may have contributed to the car accident that took his mother's life, and his anger increases exponentially when his father impregnates the woman he had the affair with, then marries her after a brief dalliance with another woman. Malloy's coming-of-age narrative can be generic, but he handles the gay angle nicely as he explores Kevin's difficulty in finding an outlet for his hormonal urges even as he struggles to maintain a relationship with a classmate named Allison Minczeski, who falls for him. The author also displays a razor-sharp comic touch in the verbal sparring between father and son as Pat tries to bring his instant family together, and he balances the comedy with some touching scenes after Pat messes up his latest domestic venture. Malloy shows plenty of talent in his gay spin on the genre, and this debut bodes well for his literary future.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The year 1978, when he graduates from high school and goes off to college, is not Kevin Doyle's best. Not only is he head-over-heels in love with classmate Jon Thompson, who is oblivious to Kevin's interest (and would be horrified if he even suspected the attraction), but Kevin learns that the accident that killed his mother two years before was most likely an act of suicide. (When she learned that her husband was planning to run off with his married lover, she drove off the road into a river and drowned.) Kevin's knowledge leads him to a showdown with his father, who continues to reveal himself as not just an inadequate father and cheating husband but a pretty rotten person. Malloy's first novel is heartfelt but ultimately unsuccessful-Kevin never quite makes the leap to three dimensions, and in many respects he seems to be a cartoon version of a real boy (sentences like "I love him so much I could puke my guts out all over the floor" don't help). Malloy can't quite decide if this is a story about coming to terms with one's sexual orientation or one about working through a troubled father/son relationship, and consequently neither works particularly well. Recommended only for comprehensive fiction collections.
Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* For Kevin Doyle in working-class northeast Minneapolis, 1978, his year of transition from high school to work and college, is a bear. Around the second anniversary of his mother's death, his volatile Aunt Nora blurts out that her sister's car crash was a suicide, done in despair because Kevin's father was going to run off with his other woman. Kevin already doesn't like his taciturn, binge-drinking dad, and now he doesn't know how he feels about his mom. Meanwhile, the tall, handsome, C student spends too much time at school asserting alpha-male status and dodging girls because he knows he's gay. Unfortunately, things go downhill for Kevin from there, often hilariously and painfully at the same time. Almost too much happens in Malloy's first novel, but he has Kevin's voice as narrator down cold. In Kevin, Malloy gives us a normally self-centered, moody teenager who is smarter than he knows and more self-possessed than nearly anyone else around him. Furthermore, if he goes through hell, he also gets some breaks, including glimpses of real gay life right in Minneapolis and enough trust from and insight into his friends to see that they are dealing with "major shit," too. More a coming-toward-coming-out than a coming-out story, this book's a beauty, whatever you call it. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

This one sneaks up on you!
In the interests of full disclosure, I should say at the outset that I can't be totally objective about this book. Brian Malloy is one of my oldest friends (we met in a group for people newly out of the closet). I've watched him write several books before this "first" novel came out. So I sat down with this book well disposed and I wasn't disappointed.

Malloy has written a fresh book that really sneaks up on you. The main character is someone unusual in gay fiction. His is not a classically smart, bookish outsider. Rather, he is a high school insider, cool, good looking, a jock. And yet, his story rings more true because of that. You feel Kevin Doyle's deep sense of alienation from himself and consequently, from everyone around him. His tone rings true...by turns smart aleck, moody, angry, sensitive, and finally vulnerable.

The best thing about the novel is that the gay angle is only one part, and not the most important part of the story. Mostly, this book is about the unraveling of secrets. Kevin has his own secret, but so does his bumbling father, his dead mother, his strong Irish Catholic aunt, even his friends. And as the secrets unravel the novel takes a surprising turn into grey territory. And the book ends paradoxically unresolved and yet satisfying. It mirrors life well...though by the end of the book you hope that Malloy is planning a sequel. You want to know more about these fascinating characters.

All in all, this is a wonderful debut, even if I'm biased. Readers of gay themed fiction should appreciate this book, but I also believe that it should find a wider general audience. The truths about adolesence and family found in this book are universal.

Thanks Brian, it was a great ride!

Attn: Book Discussion Groups
Brian Malloy's sensitive debut novel provides enough jumping-off topics to keep any book club talking well into the night...a high school senior named Kevin out in Minnesota, it provides generous food for thought on all of the following: dealing with the death of a loved one amid comflicted feelings about the person; the difficulty of parents and children to ever really see one another for who they are; the loneliness experienced by the most individual of individuals trying to fit into the society at large. Not just a serious novel, however, there's more at work here: like wry humor, a strong protagonist whose survival-against-the-odds beyond the end of the novel is a comfort to imagine; and the fact that that protagonist is allowed to be achingly human to the point where he's borderline annoying, not in a truly annoying-annoying way, but in a nostalgic-annoying way that will make older readers fondly remember, "God, I remember when I was young and the whole world moved all around me."...

Waiting for the thaw
It's 1978, and Kevin and his father are still adrift after the death of Kevin's mother two years ago. Kevin's due to graduate from high school, and in the pecking order, Kevin's near the top, despite his grades, but he has a secret crush on one of his friends. As the year progresses a series of shattering secrets surface, and the bond between father and son becomes thinner, which isn't helped by Kevin's aunt who blames her sister's death on Kevin's father. "The Year of Ice" is a beautiful story of anguish and grief, of finding oneself amidst a chaos of family trauma, of growing up gay and having to hide. Malloy deftly writes with a sarcastic wit that brings Kevin and the other characters of the story to life, and pushes this novel closer to the reader's heart. Definitely one of the best books of 2002.