Title: Byuck
Author: Theric Jepson
Publisher: Strange Violin Editions
Publishing Date: 2012
Genre: Comic novel
(Reviewed by Conor Hilton)
A classic love story dressed up with delightful insights into some of the quirks of BYU & Mormon dating. The relationship and interactions between Dave and Curses felt real and like a great reflection of interactions I had with friends. It took me awhile to really get into this book, but there’s some witty humor and delightful details–the sections of text from Dave’s journal, friend book, excerpts from the play, etc etc are wonderful and I would have loved to see more of them or at least to see them more fully integrated into the novel. Dave felt frustratingly clueless about the connection he shared with Ref (though in thinking on it & seeing another review refer to his libido-less quality, it’d be interesting to read Dave as ace and that could have been fruitful ground for exploration, but I digress) and it was inevitable from fairly early on that Dave and Ref were going to end up together, which is somewhat a feature of the genre (or at least one of the sub-genres) at work here, but not what I was expecting, which threw me off.
Anyway, an interesting experiment and some fun BYU commentary, fully realized characters, & great witty asides and details hiding in plain sight. Also, I’m really glad for the commentary on some of the more insidious iterations of BYU’s dating culture.
My review from 2013: A fun book, I enjoyed spending time with the characters, and I enjoyed the games the author did with writing style, voice, etc. Even accepting the premise, it was hard to accept how clueless and largely libido-less the male protagonist was. But lots of laughs, especially for those of us with some BYU experience.