How To Use a Bookworm: Michael Cart's My Father's Scar as a crossover novel

Abstract

This paper explores the contestable border between adult and young adult gay (male) fiction published in the United States since the late 1960s. Since the 1990s crossover novels have been published, and Michael Cart's My Father's Scar is an early example of this trend. What makes this novel acceptable both as an adult and young adult title is primarily its use of two alternating narrative lines and the bookworm narrator. Neither technique is original, yet only in the 1990s did they become widely acceptable in gay young-adult fiction.