Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun really said let's go girls!!!

 

In my last post, I mentioned that June and July were stacked. Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun by Jonny Garza Villa is another book that was in that line-up, and it’s actually a book that has been on my radar (The Saturdays tease) for quite a long while. I think I initially found out about it on Twitter, because of Julian Winters, another author I follow – whose books you should check out, by the way. So, I’ve been excited to get this for a good long while.

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My copy of the book didn’t have a blurb on it, so I’ve used the Amazon listing’s description for this section. The listing says this book is a book about coming out, first love, and being your one and only best and true self. We love to see that for one. It then goes on to mention that Julián Luna has a plan for his life, which includes graduating, getting into UCLA, and moving away from Corpus Christi, Texas, and the suffocating expectations of others that have forced him into an unauthentic life. That, from reading it, very much gave me, he’s hiding in the closet, because, perhaps his surroundings aren’t the most accepting. Then “with one impulsive tweet”, his plans are thrown out of the closet, and then Mat, a Twitter crush from LA slides into the DMs, and the story goes from there.

And, yes, I did have a lightbulb moment when I realised that Mat was the sun in question in the title – I did Creative Writing at uni, and yes, I do have two degrees, but no, I am not smart, let me live. And because Mat was the sun, that made Julián the moon. Now, I’ll say, if you’ve already read the book. It’s now time to scream when we find out that Julián is the moonlight.

So, Julián’s dad immediately gave me a bad feeling – there were points in the beginning where the told Julián not to talk or act a certain way when talking to one of his friends. Julián also says that his dad knew he was gay before he did and was insistent on stopping him from acknowledging it. But then it gets worse with his dad – I’ll say now, this book does involve mentions of physical and verbal abuse, so if that’s something you’re not okay with reading about, it might be worth giving this book a miss.

Here’s another, quick, point regarding parents in books in general, I feel like you can often tell which parents in YA books are likely going to be the ones that are going to be more antagonistic. That’s not a criticism, that’s literally just something I feel like I’ve noticed.

We’re then let in on the fact that Julián likes men pretty early on. He does however mention that even though he’s still in the closet (at the beginning of the book), he’s thankful that his friends are giving him time to sort himself out. I’ve worded that awfully, but it’s like his friends weren’t pressuring him to be any way, like they were just letting him live his life, and not forcing him to do anything. I’m not entirely sure how much I can even mention without spoiling things, and I don’t want to spoil anything, because this book came out so recently. So, what I’ll leave it with when talking about Julián’s friends is that I think I liked all of them. Some more than others – because they got more, not screen time, page time? They got more page time.

Also, Julián has an undercover gay twitter stan account, and that’s where he first sees, and meets, Mat as it is, which I just love, for one. I kind of want more stan twitter users in books.

Anyways, then Julián get very drunk and tweets out that he’s gay on his main Twitter, which ends up being how he comes out. But this coming out leads to him getting a DM from Mat, which ends up with Mat saying that he hopes Julián ends up in LA.

So, there’s something a little spoiler-y that I want to mention here, but just so you don’t accidentally read the spoiler, I’m going to put it at the very end of this post.

The book’s drama sort of starts at a simmer and stays at a simmer, until it explodes into something bad. And yes, Julián’s father is the reason. What I will say is that since the flow, the pacing, of the story is like this, I spent the first half of the book sort of on that same simmer as the drama, it was sort of like I wasn’t fully sunken into it. I was going along, sort of at this walking pace, but once the book hits that halfway point, Mary, the pace goes. She runs. The bitch is running a marathon – she doesn’t stop. Everything becomes better in the second half of the book, I’ll say that. That’s not to say that the first half was bad, it wasn’t. The second half was just better. And I think that comes with the territory that Julián sees getting out of Corpus Christi and getting to Mat in LA as a real possibility – but not a certainty. The second half of the book, I don’t know if this wording is correct, but it just felt like a victory lap. In my first draft of this post, I had written why it felt like that, but then I would have spoiled a massive part of the book.

Now, for that point that I mentioned was a bit spoiler-y, I’m going to put it here.

Julián and Mat end up meeting in person, and... The interaction of them meeting, it isn’t all that long, but it’s probably the cutest part of the book. I loved it so much. There’s this whole pent-up ball of feelings from the both of them, having only seen each other through a screen for so long, and it’s finally being released. It just made me so happy when I got to read it. I think the thing is that I just like seeing queer characters happy, and is that too much to ask?

So, while this book took a little cute while to really get going, once it got going, it got going and didn’t stop. So, I’d definitely recommend giving this a read.

    Okay, bye!