Harlan's Race

Reading Harlan's Race for the first time is like a refreshing slap to the face. I love The Frontrunner and Billy but in a way, throughout the years and the way it has been heralded as THE gay classic of all time, has made it seem less realistic and almost fable-like and surreal (despite the shocking conclusion).This book relates the events that happened after Billy's murder and maybe, I can relate to it more, because it deals with death and rebirth, agony and triumph, hatred and love in a way that is more tangible, even grittier and harsher than but nonetheless as beautiful as the Frontrunner.

How do you write a sequel to a gay American classic? Ask Patricia Nell Warren. She's done it! I can't say that I was always happy with the choices she made but I have to agree that they were the right ones.No, this isn't the Front Runner. But then no book could be. The 70's offered the gay male a new sensibility about his sexuality. It allowed him to realize that he was not some horrible outcast in modern society. The Front Runner was a romance that gay men had been waiting for since the beginning of time. Where E. M. Forster's Maurice was a romance, it unrealistically allowed the characters to have an unqualified happy ending. Warren did not. Warren gave her characters flesh, blood, and oxygen that had been so lacking in so many previous gay themed novels. I cried my eyes out when I first read The Front Runner. Because I had waited almost twenty years for the sequel, I tore through it with a vengeance. We can't hope for the love and joy that we experienced reading The Front Runner. That wonderful book's ending couldn't allow Harlan's Race to be nearly as idealistic or uplifting. However, it does provide us with a carefully crafted, believable memorial to gay fiction's (possibly most loved) character: Billy Sive. In twenty years I've moved from Billy's age to Harlan's and I found that his skin fit me well. Read this book, if you've read the first one. If not, start there and work your way forward. This is great storytelling. Warren's books should be required reading for Pat Robertson and his contemporaries. Maybe then, they would understand "forbidden love".I have to give the book four stars instead of five simply because it's missing my favorite character.

"Harlan's Race" doesn't feel as much a sequel, as a continuation. The book picks up right where the "Front Runner" left off, with Billy Sive being murdered at the Olympic Games, and it's aftermath.I was glad I had re-read "...Runner" before I started this because it helped keep the characters fresh in my mind. Nell Warren succeeds in keeping Harlan's voice a barometer of the changing times as the seventies gives way to the somewhat more tolerant 80s.The backbone of the book is really a mystery novel with an apparent accomplice in Billy's murder still loose and aiming at Harlan. I thought for the most part this was successful although the identity of the mystery person began to be telegraphed towards the end which took some suspense out of it.My only other slight disappointment with the book was the leaping of years towards the end to bring the story closer to the present. Knowing this book may be part of a total of four books, I almost wish she'd taken more time and detailed the years that are lost by being summarized on a few pages. Still I was glad to be back in Harlan's head for a while. It felt like talking with an old friend.

A wonderful book. I couldn't put it down. When you read this book you laugh you cry. All I can say is Bravo.....Patricia Bravo

Having read the other review posted here, it made me aware that some people may not get the beauty, wisdom and craft portrayed in HARLAN'S RACE, the second in THE FRONT RUNNER series... obviously this other reader did not get it.What astounds me --having read THE FRONT RUNNER, HARLAN'S RACE and BILLY'S BOY, the three to date in the series-- is the fact that Patricia Nell Warren is able to capture the essence and nuance of three very different decades, each with their own subtle --and not-so-subtle-- shadings on the emotional, political and socioeconomic fronts. A difficult task to capture in one decade. Yet Nell Warren does so over a span of three diverse decades in this tome.Even more fascinating is the fact she deeply and richly inhabits the psyche of the gay male who has survived the loss of a love... and then has to watch several generations be taken away by a scourge equally or more heinous than the assassin's bullet that took Billy from Harlan. As a man who has lived through this --I have been HIV + for over 17 years and lost a love and thousands of dear, loving and beloved people-- I speak from experience when I say Nell Warren has, with HARLAN'S RACE, pinpointed an accuracy that pierces deeply into that mindset and takes us on the long, hollow pursuit of life, liberty and happiness that always seems a stride away. Harlan races towards something he can't grasp, and his attempts to reach out for and fill a void no one can fathom the depths of until living it is deeply moving. Our author, through the voice of our protaganist, takes us into these landscapes honestly, and at times, a bit brutally. But always eloquently.HARLAN'S RACE also has a fair amount of suspense, with some harrowing stalking in some dark, psychologically twisted terrain. If you loved Billy in THE FRONT RUNNER, you HAVE to read HARLAN'S RACE to have some questions answered, including by a few very "not-right" individuals that are portrayed in a manner consistent with the psychos some of our right-wing organizations churns out with their agendas of hate and intolerance. Scary, but very real... these people DO exist!As well, in HARLAN'S RACE we get to find out more about some of our favorites from THE FRONT RUNNER. The Prescott's --including the matriarch of this extended family, the ever lovely and deeply loving Marian-- return, and we watch how our heroine handles some of the major changes life hands to all of us at some point. Betsy Heden returns as does Vince Matti, that smouldering sexual seething rebel who goes through a life change or two as well. And someone we only briefly met before, Chino, one of the bodyguards, begins slowly unfolding before us in HARLAN'S RACE, though always a dark secret remains. An enigma that I would love to see more of, Chino understands Harlan's loss all too well.HARLAN'S RACE is different than THE FRONT RUNNER. Just as you and I are different in the 1990's from what we were in the 1980's