Boise, Kid. Mikey and the Chickadee. Boise Urban Publishing Company, 2016. 304 p. PB. $14.95 ISBN 978-0-692-62976-5.

This carefully-crafted first novel is a marvelous love story, slowly developed over its 300 pages. Both Wyatt and Mikey are in their 20s. They meet gradually on a bus on their way to work. The locale is not identified, but thanks to many clues and confirmation from the author, we know it is loosely Vancouver, British Columbia.

Wyatt is white, and grew up in a largely Asian neighborhood, while Mikey is Thai-Canadian. Wyatt has some experience with gay relationships, but Mikey is closeted and nervous, so the action evolves very slowly, but with growing intensity, culminating when Wyatt is job-transferred to a town some miles away. At the very last moment, Wyatt decides not to move and to stay with Mikey. This book includes some quiet and tentative sex, well portrayed with great sensitivity.

The young author was born and raised in Boise, Idaho, and now lives in Vancouver, B.C. He earned a B.A. in creative writing at the University of Idaho in 2012. His novel is told in the third person, displaying incredible patience with the slowly-developing relationship.

I highly recommend this new work for gay writing collections and for individuals who want to read a real love story. I look forward to this writer’s next novel.

James Doig Anderson
Professor Emeritus of Library and Information Science, Rutgers University