Reviewer: Alan Chin
Publisher: Riverhead Books
★★★
This
was not a book I picked to read, as I’m not interested in reading about anything
as grotesque as conversion therapy. It was selected by my book club.
It’s
a story about a gay son of a Baptist minister who got outed to his parents.
They placed him in a conversion therapy camp to “cure” him, and things didn’t
go well for the young man.
Although
the prose is extremely well written, I found the pacing and content numbingly
boring. What I did find interesting was the total Christian brainwashing that
the author had suffered as a young man. I find it both horrifying and amazing
that, in this age of science, people still take the bible literally. Boy Erased, in my opinion, is a book of
sadness. A story of people who rebuff nature to pursue a myth.
