Desert Boys

March 28, 2016
The first-person narrator of McCormick’s engaging coming-of-age story is Daley Kushner, the son of a “severely cautious” Armenian immigrant mother who won’t let her son play paintball as a kid, growing up in Southern California. There are 12 stories, linked not only by Daley but by prominent characters in his life. The stories in which Daley, known in the book as Kush, interacts with his friends have a shaggy, circuitous, random feeling—a combination of edge and aimlessness that believably evokes adolescent anomie and angst. The opening story, “Mother, Godfather, Baby, Priest,” by far the longest, falls into this category and sets the table for what follows. Teenage Kush and his friends are grappling with issues involving sex; Kush is also queer and discovering his sexuality, which informs his outsider status in this and later narratives. Stories with a more conventional focus, such as “My Uncle’s Tenant,” about a charismatic but ultimately unsavory character Kush meets through his uncle Gaspar, benefit from the background that other stories have provided. Close friend Karinger figures at least peripherally in every story, and the penultimate one, “Shelter,” depicts a warmly amusing escapade involving the duo at just the right point in the book. A lovely, quiet book by a promising new voice.

Starred review from March 1, 2016
A series of linked stories charts a young man's coming-of-age. Meet the Kushner family and their friends, who live north of Los Angeles in Antelope Valley in a town bordered by the hot Mojave Desert. Some of the 12 linked stories in McCormick's stunningly good debut collection are narrated by Daley Kushner, and all focus on him. Telling his story from when he was a young boy to a young man, they reveal his coming to grips with his homosexuality and his desire to leave home. The stories jump back and forth in time, with each one acting like a photo in the picture album that is his life. Here's Daley playing paintball in the desert with his best friends, Robert Karinger (his first love) and Dan Watts. Another shows us Daley the young man with his lover Lloyd, who runs a bookstore in San Francisco. And within the stories, characters tell stories and we keep learning more about everyone, as if we were putting together a large puzzle piece by piece. One piece is about Lena, Daley's Armenian mother, who may be uncomfortable with her only son being gay; another is about his father, a furniture salesman, and the way he once wrote a play in high school, which surprises Daley, who's always been a bit ashamed of his parents. There's Jean (she rhymes it with "parmesan"), his older sister, who understands him, which he loves. There's Gaspar, Lena's brother, and Jackie, Karinger's girlfriend--every story seems crucial to better understanding these people and Daley's relationships with them. They're told in a simple, clean, and polished style a reader can easily settle into. Although they're pretty serious, there's enough humor to bring out laughs and smiles. When we leave Antelope Valley we immediately want to go back, so achingly good are these beautifully conceived stories. Tender, heartfelt, fully realized stories about family, friendship, and love.

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May 1, 2016
The linked stories that make up McCormick's debut loosely trace Daley Kushner's coming of age in the Antelope Valley, a small community near California's Mojave Desert. The question everyone from Antelope Valley faces is whether to stay or go, and even after Daley leaves to pursue a writing career in San Francisco, he can't quite escape his memoriesthe discovery of his homosexuality as a teenager, the loss of his Armenian mother to cancer and his best friend to war, and the haunting desert landscape, home to unforgettable characters. There's the black man who once donned the costume of his high school's racist mascot and is now an ambitious Bay Area politician. There are the men who collect VW vans and lead two teenage girls to a horrific end. And then there's Robert Karinger, with whom Daley crafted a paintball battlefield when they were kids and scoured for golf balls to hit on the desert golf course. Bold and intoxicating, McCormick's stories redefine manhood in the face of war, longing, and escape.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)