Well I read If I Can Give You That

 

Today I’m talking about one of those books that I really have no idea how I came about it, but I did. It might have been a recommendation, it might have been Twitter, I don’t know. And that’s not me saying, “Ooh look at this book I found”, it just turned up, I guess. Either way, it’s If I Can Give You That by Michael Gray Bulla.

The blurb says that seventeen-year-old Gael is used to keeping to himself. Though his best friend gets him to attend a meeting of Plus, a support group for LGBTQIA+ teens, Gael doesn’t plan on sharing much. Where would he even start? Between supporting his mother through bouts of depression, keeping his distance from his estranged father, and navigating senior year as a transgender boy at a conservative Tennessean high school, his life is a lot to unload on strangers. So when he meets open, easy going Declan, Gael can’t help but feel a little out of his depth. As their relationship deepens, Gael begins to find himself between the tentative joys of a widening social circle and the pain of his father’s increasingly persistent attempts to reconnect as his mother’s mental health worsens. After tragedy strikes, Gael must decide if he can trust his new friends with his whole heart, or if the risk of letting the walls around it come down is too great.

It's immediately very heavy compared to the last book that I read, Lose You To Find Me. And while the book doesn’t specifically mention it, I’ll give the content warning of mentions of depression, self-harm, and suicide.

The very first thing we see is Gael being told that he can skip the first meeting of Plus, the support group, if he wants to by a friend, Nicole. He’s very scared about it, maybe not scared, but nervous, and has a lot of anxiety about it. You can tell that he’s the kind of person who is much more comfortable looking from the outside in. In the beginning of the second chapter, he mentions how he was happy seeing everyone else interact, but not worrying about coming up with stuff to say. In this chapter, you do get told about his mother’s depressive episodes. Also, in both of these chapters, he runs into Declan, first at the meeting, and then again when Declan starts working at the pizza place that he and Nicole both work at.

Near the beginning, when he’s hanging out with Nicole, Declan and this other girl, Jacqueline, he mentions that he’s not that used to being around her, so he’s just trying to not be weird and annoying. Then a little later, when he’s hanging out with Declan’s friend group, he mentions feeling like an outsider. And ooh, he puts into words how anxiety feels, or how it does for me, so well. There’s a moment where he gets kissed and almost starts spiralling and this is where he mentions to the reader how he can’t comprehend that it was him that got kissed. It just didn’t click in his head that there was someone who liked him, simply for the reason that he wasn’t the kind of person that people liked.

You see when his dad comes back, just how hard Gael tries to fight to stay the way things are, but you end up seeing that with some of the things his dad says, he does unfortunately have a point. Gael, shockingly, only sees what Gael sees. He’s unable to see things from other people’s perspective. He’s only seen his view, and, to him, that is or were the events of what happened. And then to him, they were the events that happened. So, even if he’s not seeing the whole truth, or whole mess, what he saw is the whole mess to him, and you sort of just have to take that with the book. You see the frustration that he goes through when he’s realising that what he’s seen might not be the 100% reality of the matter.

This was very much one of those “things just happen” kinds of books. I don’t particularly think there was that much in the way of plot. It was more about Gael just trying to navigate what’s going on around him. Throughout the book, even though Gael was mentioning it himself, just by what he was thinking, you could sort of tell when things were ramping up – especially when it came to his mother. He mentions to the reader that there are points his mum’s mental health and depression has been better and also times it had been worse, so there were points where I was sort of waiting on bated breath, because I thought something bad was going to happen in the very next chapter. And I’ve really got to give the book that.

I also really loved that Gael acted his age. He acted like a teenager. He was faced with so many frustrating situations, situations that required the ability to face what it was that needed facing. Then even despite the fact Gael had been through more than a lot of other teens his age, he still was a teenager, and reacted the way a teenager would. There were times where I wanted Gael to sit, be more mature and be able to have the conversations he needed to have with some of the characters, but instead he didn’t. There were times where, because he didn’t know what to do, he’d just get up and storm out instead of facing these uncomfortable things like you’d expect someone young and immature to.

It’s a little difficult for me to talk about the side characters, outside of Gael’s family and Nicole. Since Gael doesn’t have friends at the start of the book, the cast isn’t all that big, and once people start turning up, yes, they get drips and drops of expansion, but it’s in that weird realm of since Gael is getting to know them for the first time, it’s almost like we are as well, like they haven’t existed before Gael meets them. And in a way it’s because they haven’t, since Gael doesn’t know about them. I appreciated how Gael’s family dynamic worked. As you went through the book, there were sections from Gael’s past and from when he was younger, giving exposition and explanations as to why and how things were at the point they were in the present.

This is definitely one of those books that I enjoyed, but that I won’t be rushing back to any time soon. That’s not because it was bad in any form, it’s more to do with the heavy themes. Given how heavily depression – and more severe things – play a part in this book, it’s not something I can see myself wanting to spend too much time with. Still, this was still a good read in the end, and I really enjoyed Gael’s journey into self-acceptance and coming into his own confidence.

Okay, bye!