THE DAYS OF BLUEGRASS LOVE

The heated beginnings of an international queer romance.

Tycho Zeling has never really thought about the course his life should take. Perhaps that’s why he makes the sudden decision to take a gap year after high school and spend his summer at an international youth camp in Knoxville, Tennessee. In the Amsterdam airport, the Dutch teen happens to meet up with a fellow junior counselor who is headed for the same camp—Oliver Kjelsberg from Norway. The two strike up a fast friendship and end up sharing a tiny supply closet as their camp housing. After Tycho awakens to his feelings for Oliver, what follows seems fantastically inevitable. The boys’ romance rushes along largely in private until the camp director tells them they need to be more discreet. Even though the majority of the staff support them, Oliver and Tycho decide they would rather leave than live inauthentically. They depart for Oliver’s empty house (his mother is on holiday), where Tycho now has the privilege of seeing his boyfriend in his natural habitat, but he still cannot find a place for himself. Dutch author van de Vendel’s writing is poetic, intensely emotional, and sensitively philosophical in this beautiful translation by Rault. This book, originally published in 1999, is described in the author’s note as standing in defiance of the old trend of depressing, fatalistic queer literature; it leaves readers with an open ending that leans strongly toward the optimistic.

An enduring story populated with endearing characters.