Adam is a cisgender teen, and trying to justify his deceit as just a teen being a teen really doesn’t work. It is a problematic plot line, when you think about it. The only thing that you might not be able to relate to is the fact he tricks somebody into thinking he’s trans so she’ll fall in love with him. He goes to a house party where everybody is watching The L Word (funny, since Schrag wrote for the show for two seasons) and doesn’t totally get it, he stumbles around New York like a lost tourist, and just wants to be accepted. Adam is just like any other suburban teenager: smoking weed out of an old Budweiser can, harboring strange notions of love and sex, awkward, horny, guided mostly by hormones, and dreaming of everybody from girls on porn sites to Hasidic girls in a way that would make even Alexander Portnoy blush. She is sensitive to the different lifestyles, but still finds ways to make you laugh.

The most important aspect about Adam is that Schrag never treats the queer characters in the book like props set up for comic relief. But a few pages in, I realized that not only is Adam a wonderful book, it is quite possibly the best entry in the coming-of-age category since Adam Wilson’s Flatscreen. The premise - one that can be adequately summed up as “teenage boy goes to New York to visit his sister for a summer, lies to a girl about being a trans, gets girl to fall in love with him even though she likes girls hilarity ensues” - had me staring at the back cover for a few minutes, wondering what I was getting myself into.

Then there’s Adam by Ariel Schrag, the debut novel by the cartoonist and television writer who has taken the bildungsroman route before to great results and acclaim with her graphic novels, Definition and Awkward. How badly has that literary vehicle broken down? Sure, there have been a few bright spots in the last few years, but the post-Holden Caulfield coming-of-age crop hasn’t yielded too much to write home about, possibly because as technology advances and we become more disconnected from each other, teenagers become more and more difficult for adults to write about or even understand than ever before. With all the recent talk about adults reading books written specifically for teenagers, maybe it’s time to shift the conversation to books about teenagers written for a predominantly adult audience.

Awkward and Definition by Ariel Schrag