Who said there's no market for a book about gay teens? A lot of people, actually, which is one reason the success of the new young adult novel Geography Club is so sweet.

The story is about a group of closeted gay high school students who band together to form their own club, which they name the Geography Club so no one will guess its true purpose. The story is told from the perspective of Russel, a boy who hasn't come out to anyone but himself and struggles with a crush on the school jock.

When he finally tells his best friend Min that he's gay, he discovers that she's been keeping a secret of her own: her three-year relationship with a lesbian on the school's soccer team.

Min isn't a lesbian, though, she's bisexual--which is where the book is particularly cutting-edge.

Lesbian teens are rare enough in young adult fiction, but bisexual teens are virtually non-existent, and Asian-American teens are also mostly absent from this genre. So to prominently feature a bisexual Asian-American teenage girl in a book for teens is practically revolutionary.

But none of this would have much of an impact if the story wasn't any good. Fortunately, Hartinger has written a compelling, engrossing novel in which serious subjects are addressed, but not at the cost of humor and good writing.

Gay characters in YA fiction are often written to be a little too perfect, as if their sexuality were such a weakness that they needed to be ideal in every other way to balance it out. Geography Club avoids this trap by making all the characters realistically flawed in their own way, yet somehow still sympathetic. Besides Russel, who disappoints Min when he won't do the right thing because it might jeopardize his new relationship with a boy, there is Min's girlfriend Terese, who has some anger-management issues; Terese's gay friend Irwin, who once tried to kill himself because he was gay; and Russel's straight friend Gunnar, who in a moment of weakness, sacrifices his friendship with Russel for the chance to get laid.

Min is actually the most sympathetic character of the lot, the only one willing to stand up for what she believes in even when it jeopardizes her relationship with Terese. By the end of the novel, some of the characters have redeemed themselves, but others have given in to their fears, another refreshing change from many YA novels with gay teens which make the endings too neat.

In his interview with AfterEllen.com, Hartinger explains that Geography Club was rejected by publishers seventeen times before being picked up by Harper Collins because these publishers believed there was no market for a book about gay teens. Imagine their surprise, then, that only three months after its release, the book is now in its third printing, and in the process of being turned into both a play and a movie.

Meanwhile, Hartinger is already at work on the sequel, which will feature Min even more prominently--and that couldn't be better news for lesbian and bisexual teens.

Geography Club / BrentHartinger.com