Rough Patch

by Nicole Markotic

Overview

When fifteen-year-old Keira starts high school, she almost wishes she could write "Hi, my name is Keira, and I'm bisexual!" on her nametag. Needless to say, she's actually terrified to announce—let alone fully explore—her sexuality. Quirky but shy, loyal yet a bit zany, Keira navigates her growing interest in kissing both girls and boys while not alienating her BFF, boy-crazy Sita. As the two acclimate to their new high school, they manage to find lunch tablemates and make lists of the school's cutest boys. But Keira is caught "in between"—unable to fully participate, yet too scared to come clean.

She's also feeling the pressure of family: parents who married too young and have differing parenting styles; a younger sister in a wheelchair from whom adults expect either too little or too much; and her popular older brother who takes pleasure in taunting Keira. She finds solace in preparing for the regional finals of figure skating, a hobby she knows is geeky and "het girl" yet instills her with confidence. But when she meets a girl named Jayne who seems perfect for her, she isn't so confident she can pull off her charade any longer.

Rough Patch is an honest, heart-wrenching novel about finding your place in the world, and about how to pick yourself up after taking a spill.

Nicole Markotic is a poet and novelist who teaches children's literature at the University of Windsor. This is her first young adult novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781551526829
Publisher:	Arsenal Pulp Press, Limited
Publication date:	05/22/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	12 Years

About the Author

Nicole Markotic is a novelist, critic, and poet who teaches Children’s Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Canada. Her most recent book is the poetry collection Whelmed (Coach House), and she has widely published in Canada, the USA, Australia, and Europe.

Editorial Reviews

04/01/2017
Gr 8 Up—Keira has just started high school, and already her boy-obsessed best friend Sita is trying to get her a boyfriend. The problem is that Keira is not sure she wants a boyfriend; she spent the summer with a crush on a girl only to find herself in the arms of a boy, and she is now grappling with what it really means to be bisexual. She occupies her time at the ice rink training in competitive figure skating, at her after-school job cleaning dentist offices, and taking on the world alongside her precocious sister Sammie, who is a wheelchair user, while avoiding her antagonistic brother Tyler. After a blowup with Sita, Keira finds solace in new friend and romantic interest Jayne, a confident and strong-willed lesbian who is hiding her sexuality from her fundamentalist Christian family. Keira's parents are selectively supportive, encouraging her to excel at school but skirting the issue of the teen's sexuality. The writing is weak (a less compelling Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison), and the pacing is poor, with very little happening in the first half, and the highly dramatic ending feels rushed. While the prose and plotting leave much to be desired, this is one of few realistic YA novels about bisexuality. VERDICT Recommended for libraries looking to amp up the B of their LGBTQ collections.—Shira Pilarski, Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, Washington, DC

School Library Journal

2017-03-06
A closeted aspiring figure skater struggles with friends, family, and relationships.Keira's Calgary high school isn't a bastion of tolerance, but there's a small clique of gay kids she could theoretically join if she revealed her sexuality. Sadly, she knows they'd never accept a "by-sex-you-all." If she dates a boy, she'll never get a chance with a girl; if she reveals her feelings for boys, the gay kids will think she's a coward trying to seem "normal." Plagued by crushes on boys and girls alike, Keira struggles with her best friend's casual homophobia. After a secret relationship, revelations, and traumas, Keira encounters a resolution so cruel that it hearkens back to the era when queer teens in books for teens were always punished by novel's end. The myriad concerns of this white ice skater's life (as well as the aforementioned issues, Keira struggles with bullying at home and at school, money problems, and grade worries) threaten to overwhelm the narrative. Her supposedly all-consuming passion for figure skating is drowned by the surplus of topics and enthusiastic parenthetical asides and could be swapped with any other hobby with scarcely any noticeable change. Bisexual teen protagonists are rare enough to give some value to a middling entry like this one, but it's best for completists who've already read better choices, such as Hannah Moskowitz's landmark Not Otherwise Specified (2015). (Fiction. 12-15)

Kirkus Reviews