Showmances and Stage Kisses by Bowden Walker

The first title in the Heights High series, Bowden Walker’s Showmances and Stage Kisses is a highly entertaining and nostalgia-rich work of young adult fiction exploring the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll-fueled world of 1980s New York City.

Seventeen-year-old Sebastian Weiss is a certified genius who started attending Columbia as a child, but he’s feeling restless and unhappy with his life. He’s destined to matriculate at an elite university, but he’d rather spend time with his best friend Nicholas Howell – the young star of “Heights High,” a soap opera about a Brooklyn Heights school. Sebastian’s life is the opposite of Nicholas’, whose days and nights are filled with drinking, partying, music video shoots, and models. Sebastian, on the other hand, has never even kissed a girl. When Sebastian develops a crush on Nicholas’ new co-star, the boys’ friendship will be tested to the limit.

Despite being set in high school, Showmances and Stage Kisses is refreshingly honest about the adult nature of teenage years, especially the lives of young stars. The main characters have to cope with abusive partners and disinterested parents, while also trying to memorize lines and make it to set on time. At the same time, the characters are not so adult as to be unrealistically mature, as the book is also about the “firsts” in a young person’s life, so the book works as a relatable work of coming of age fiction, albeit in a setting that makes you grow up fast.

Never condescending to teen readers, Bowden Walker has a knack for portraying the messes that teens get into, as well as the resilient ways they pick themselves back up again, in this captivating young adult novel set against a uniquely evocative backdrop.