“As someone who grew up gay in the 1970s, I cannot express what it would have meant to me to have a book like this, a book with a gay protagonist who is so true, real and vulnerable a plot that gives readers a transporting, exceptionally sexy romance and an ending that offers genuine hope.
His editor, Arthur Levine, echoes those sentiments. It was in high school that I needed to read about relationships between boys.” I searched out books like John Rechy’s ‘City of Night’ and Gore Vidal’s ‘The City and the Pillar’ in my 20s, and they were amazing. Then I read James Baldwin and was swept away by it. “The Mary Renault books that I read were a big help.
“A book like this one would have made life much easier when I was a teenager,” he says. With it, Grimsley has written the kind of book that might have eased his fraught coming-of-age as a gay man from the rural South. No spoilers, but suffice it to say “Dove” has a happy ending, for a change. One function of creating your own world in a novel is that you can save yourself. “It’s written for the YA market, but I hope older readers of all backgrounds will respond to the storytelling and recognize those heady feelings of first love,” Grimsley says in a phone interview from his home in Goldsboro, North Carolina.
