"Passages in Life" by Jubal Harshaw (jubal@flash.net). Guest review by Green Onions.

Ah . . . the joys of church summer camp. Fresh air, tall trees, silly skits, roasted marshmallows, clear spring water, and--um--the other stuff.

No, I don't mean sneaking out at midnight and managing to put all the camp superintendent's furniture out on rowboats tied to the pier or any of the other clever stunts that bored kids do in order to while away the first time in their conscious lifetimes in which they must somehow survive bereft of the blandishments of computer games, the vidiot box, and the local cruising strip. (Well to be frank: this is a.s.s.--not a 'Leave it to Beaver' rerun on cable TV--so you can bet that the "other stuff" I was talking about is the forbidden fruit normally denied to kids young enough to be denizens of these would-be gardens of Eden.)

But this is not a child porno story ; in fact the protagonist is an almost unbelievably mature seventeen year old boy whose brilliantly planned and skillfully executed pranks of several years ago have since become legendary at the camp. His lover is another counselor who happens to be scarcely nineteen herself and the job they both have ahead of them is to make their relationship fully functional.

Well, what is there to a boy's 'first time' anyway? Is it a gradual process, one that begins with a lot of groping, giggling, cuddling and caressing and that eventually ends all-too-quickly in a juicy sticky splattered mess? Actually our hero's baptism is a long drawn-out affair, one that the author studies reverently in a remarkable number of sensual and psychological dimensions through the mind of an unusually reflective protagonist. This is _anything but_ a story of a 'quick fuck.'

Indeed this piece isn't principally about sex at all, even though there's no shortage of hot scenes. It has much more to do with romance and the recovery process from a short lifetime of failed youthful expectations--AKA: 'growing up.' As the plot develops, we discover that he and his lover have met before; both have an intricately developed past that turns out to account in large measure for mysterious ways in which they move.

What does it mean to cross the sacred threshold between childhood and adulthood in the context of romantic relationships? What does it mean to have a love affair based on more than superficial attraction or hot passing passion? How does a sensible person (or to be more precise, _two_ sensible people) deal with the molting of their adolescent fantasies and the emergence of integrated romantic, sensual, and spiritual desire? And how will our hero step out of the shoes of a boy in order to don the vestments of His Lover's Man?

This is not a story for the impatient or intellectually feckless reader: at something in the neighborhood of 35,000+ words, it almost qualifies for the label 'short novel.' Most of the time I found myself enjoying the author's slow, painstaking and loving style of careful psychological development--but at other moments I occasionally wondered which of the myriad details presented in the first few chapters would turn out to be important.

Granted: a certain amount of seemingly 'irrelevant' information is desirable in any story to paint the scenes in the reader's mind, to frame the events, and to develop the characters. And one so often hears from the _literati_ that a typical weakness of erotica inheres in the inability or unwillingness of so many writers to weave their protagonists' actions into the subtle complex tapestry of human needs, desires and motivations--a criticism that certainly hits the bulls' eye for all too many a.s.s. submissions.

Yet although the author's gift for careful description tended to make the story a bit slow at the beginning (for example, we learn the names of nearly a dozen different subdivisions of the camp in one of the early chapters: none of which is used later), it turned out to be a solid foundation on which to base the unfolding of the plot--the basic outlines of which are probably familiar to nearly everyone who has legitimate access to this newsgroup.

Overall this is an extremely thoughtful, well written and remarkably sophisticated piece that might have been even better if the writer had kept in mind that in art, less can sometimes be more. It's also one of the sweetest emerging sexuality/emerging romance stories I've had the pleasure of reading and one that I think most patient straight or bisexual readers will find both charming and delightful.