There is something about summer and coming-of-age stories.
Maybe it is because so much coming of age occurs during summers, with their long, sultry days too hot and sticky to do much besides come of age.

Once you've passed that important milestone, you can get down to the serious business of reading books about how fictional characters managed it.

I thoroughly enjoyed Born Confused. It is always fun to try to predict which books will "stand the test of time," and though far from a masterpiece, I think this one might.

Whether it does or not, Hidier will. She has a gift for language that will leave you googling around to ferret out when she might write something else, and an instinctive sense of the fine balance between capturing a slice of an era without rendering the book inaccessible to future generations.

Her themes are simple and ordinary: adolescence, friendship, sexual and gender identity, self-acceptance, and those magic moments when one's parents cease to be background cartoon characters and become human beings, and love in its myriad forms makes the transition from emotional disorder to sublime if incomprehensible mystery.

Amazon categorizes this book as for "young adults." I disagree. Although young adults will certainly enjoy it, this is not a book that I would be so hasty to pigeonhole with such a label, at least not for a few decades. Time will tell.

Though Born Confused is no Catcher in the Rye, and far from flawless, Hidier's tale of protagonist Dimple's eighteenth year manages to blend the timely into the timeless and the unique into the universal a little too skillfully for older readers to safely dismiss it as teen fare.