GLBT YA is a core part of Carolrhoda Lab. Like Brooklyn, Burning, this is a completely original and brutal look at what it means to be gay and a teenager in America.

Ben is a good kid whose single moment of inattention and cowardice turns his life upside down and places the guilt of a whole community on his shoulders., The story is told from Ben's POV. As he writes, he's a combat medic in Afghanistan, but three years earlier, he was
seventeen, a normal kid in Wisconsin and on track to get into a very good college. For reasons he can never quite articulate and that haunt him forever after, he befriends Jimmy Egan, a boy two years younger. Ben's simple act of kindness quickly twists into a complicated kind of cruelty. There's much more to Jimmy than meets the eye as Ben discovers when Jimmy wins a national photography competition-and Ben's in one of the winning pictures. Thing is, Ben didn't even know about the picture and, well, the portrait leads people to draw some conclusions about Ben and Jimmy. Rumors fly. Then Jimmy is murdered in what everyone is sure was a hate crime-and not only does Ben do nothing to stop it, he tells no one what he saw. Much of the last half of the book is Ben wrestling with his conscience while trying to stay one step ahead of the FBI. Until finally he breaks., In many mythologies, the sin eater was the person who cleansed a body of sin after death. The sin eater was an outcast from the community even though he was essential for cleansing that community of sin and guilt. For one small Wisconsin town with terrible guilt, Ben is the sin eater.