Review: As Far as You’ll Take Me by Phil Stamper

Marty is a 17-year-old (mostly closeted) gay kid from Kentucky with a passion for playing the oboe. His parents are devoted Christians. He tells them he has been accepted to the famous Knightsbridge music academy in London and heads over to stay with his aunt Leah and cousin Shane — but really, he is trying to escape.

We follow Marty as he discovers not just his sexuality, but himself. Even still, As Far As You’ll Take Me is not about self-discovery as much as the discovery of others: that letting people into your life is always a risk, that others will somehow fail you as often as you fail them, but that they are worth it. It is about the reality of love as opposed to the ideal. Stamper’s biggest achievement in this book is to show how love is a kind of effort that we make with people.
Not all the book’s threads quite lead in this direction: in particular, Marty’s relationship with one of his Kentucky friends is not quite fleshed out and feels unresolved at the end. But in general, the book moves with feeling.

The narrative is often light-hearted and full of quips, mostly fish-out-of-water stuff that simulates the experience of an American teenager abroad for the first time. These are funny and give the book a roundedness: there aren’t so many as to overwhelm an Irish reader. The book contains discussions of mental illness, eating disorders, and troubled family relationships — it handles these sensitively and sincerely.

Rory O’Sullivan