REVIEWED BY
FROST
"Friends Unlikely"
by Susan Smith Alvis
Rating: 4 Swords  

Friends Unlikely







Susan Alvis
Amira Press
August 2007
GLBT/Contemporary
www.amirapress.com
261 pp.
4 Swords

Friends Unlikely is a heartbreaking and heartwrenching cautionary tale about a group of high-school friends, who had bonded in grade
school despite their very differing personalities. The only “outsider”-the one who didn’t know them from way-back-when-is Raj Hussain, an
import who moved into their East Tennessee mountain community of Sevierville following the tragedy of September Eleventh. As a boy from
Middle Eastern heritage, and as a diabetic, Raj would have been reclusive had the four friends-Abbie, Davina, Carlos, and Juan—not taken
him into their group.

Abbie calls them the five misfits who fit into a puzzle of their own making. But eventually Raj becomes the outsider in yet another, and much
more terrifying, way. Introduced by Carlos to a visiting girl whom Carlos knows vaguely, Raj loses his virginity in a one-time fling. Never
before and never since has he experienced intimacy; but this single time has arrived with its own price. Within weeks, he is suffering
symptoms he attributes to mono. Within a year, the girl is dead-of AIDS-and Raj is diagnosed as HIV positive. The time has come when the
five were pull together more intensely than ever, or divided they will fall.
         
No reader will keep a dry eye during this story, or afterward; but if it causes just one young adult {or more mature age-person} to think
ahead, and to avoid a moment of unnecessary temptation, it will be well worth the sorrow. Raj’s tragedy comes out of an event which was
more of an afterthought, soon to be forgotten, than even a pleasurable experience. Yet it changes the entire course of his life, and death.
What a thought-provoker this story is.


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