Last week, I finished reading the book Running with Lions by Julian Winters. The main character is Sebastian Hughes, a boy who’s about to go into his senior year of high school. The novel itself takes place during the summer, at Sebastian’s summer camp. He’s a goalie on his school’s soccer team, and the whole team has been going to this same soccer camp for years, to train before the school year starts. The majority of Sebastian’s team (and Hughes himself) is part of the LGBT community, and the story centres around the team’s positive masculinity and the relationship that Sebastian has with one of his teammates, Emir Shah.
When Sebastian was younger, he dealt a lot with bullies. He was a little overweight as a kid, so he sported the nickname “Bastian the Trashcan” . Even though he’s gone into high school, lost loads of weight and started working out, his weight issues still follow him around like a dark cloud. He’s not happy with his body and this brings him down quite a bit. This book talks a lot about the insecurities that Sebastian has. The taunts of his childhood bullies still haunt him. He spends quite a bit of the book, rekindling the friendship he had with another boy, Emir Shah. As the two of them become close, Emir aids Sebastian in becoming more comfortable with his body and accepting who is as. Acceptance is a massive part of this novel and I really liked reading about Sebastian’s struggles with himself, as well as how he overcame them.
This book was honestly quite lovely to read. At my age, many boys seem to deal with a lot of toxic masculinity, and I found that this book really steered away from the general mood of grade nine boys. Yes, everyone in this book is quite a bit older than 14/15, but I’ve noticed that the views on masculinity are quite similar. Everyone who’s on the team, is incredibly accepting of every different race, gender (though it is an all boys team) and sexuality. There are many guys on the team, who seem to have no issue being close with their friends, no matter their sexual orientation. That’s something that I wish I could see in every day life. Most guys I know have issues being affectionate with their guy friends, and if they are, they need to make sure that their friend knows that they aren’t “being gay”. I’m hoping that as we get older, they’ll start to get more comfortable with just, being normal. I really loved being able to read about guys who were comfortable just being themselves and didn’t worry about what others thought or how they were perceived. I know that that happening in real life is probably a far away dream, but I’m keeping my hopes up. Hopefully, as more books like this one start to come out, guys will start to see that being affectionate with their friends isn’t wrong and that showing actual emotion is perfectly okay.
I would seriously recommend this to anyone looking for something new to read, it’s funny and lighthearted and just all around perfect in my opinion. It tackles a good few subjects and issues and it’s a read for everyone.
