This post was written by Adam Sass, author of Cursed Boys and Broken Hearts.
Hello, I’m Adam Sass, and while I’m here to talk about my newest YA second chances romance, Cursed Boys and Broken Hearts, I’m also here to talk about your second chance—to rewrite your own history through art, as I did with this book.
See, in Cursed Boys, which is a contemporary reimagining of Beauty and the Beast from the Beast’s perspective, Grant Rossi is a gay boy who’s depressed, dramatic, and hopelessly out of his depth in the romance department. In other words, an ordinary gay boy—I really could’ve saved the extra adjectives! So, Grant believes he cursed himself to lose his crush, Ben, and remain single forever when he made a foolish wish as a closeted boy on his family’s mythical Wishing Rose. The rose allegedly reveals your true love and has brought together four generations of Rossi’s. For years, Grant believed his wish backfired. That is, until the summer after graduation when he stays at Vero Roseto, his family’s failing bed and breakfast and finds Ben, the crush he lost, is now their gardener. Can Grant break his curse and reunite with Ben? And can they both get the bed and breakfast back in shape to save it from the bank?
As I wrote Grant’s story, what began as a sweet-n-simple second chances romance turned into something shockingly personal. Halfway through drafting Cursed Boys, I realized I was writing about the summer my grandmother died. I was in high school, but unlike Grant, I tragically had no handsome Scottish gardener boy in my life. However, the summers at my grandmother’s home were no less magical. Friendless in my daily life, for those few weeks every summer when my parents and aunts would dump me and my cousins together at my grandmother’s to get some vacation time, I could finally come out of my shell (if not the closet). My brother and I had half a dozen cousins our age, so we were one big gang, swimming, playing Nintendo, camping on the sprawling back lawn, haunting the local ice cream stand, and playing the slot machine in the basement way too many times. It was only for a few weeks each year, but for a boy trapped inside himself, it was proof that a vibrant extrovert was alive inside me…and could someday become all of me.
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Then, one summer, it ended. My grandmother died very suddenly, and because she was the family glue, it ended up being one of the last summers I’d spend there. Certainly, when we did gather, it was never the same. Not long after that, I left for college, we lost the house, and I never saw it again. Countless memories down the drain. Until last year, when my fingers started moving independently over my keyboard writing about Grant, a boy who lost his grandmother and is about to lose their home. Writing the descriptions of Vero Roseto, I recreated the laundry chute I used to shoot Nerf darts at; I recreated her basement, with its games, Halloween masks, and cabinets filled with fireworks and pickled vegetables. I even recreated the slot machine. As I typed “the end,” I pumped my arms in victory. The house I lost wasn’t gone—I preserved it in these pages, just with a few added flourishes like a vineyard and a mythical rose garden. But the rest, inside, is exactly the house from my memory. The house would never vanish; it would live as long as someone had a copy of Cursed Boys.
Memoir can be a powerful thing, but fiction can be equally powerful—cathartic, even—in telling your story. In Cursed Boys, Grant Rossi’s journey of self-healing isn’t just about getting kisses (although, trust, there’s plenty of that!), it’s about a boy who felt overpowered by fate learning that he can fight against it. That he always could. Grant felt left out of his family’s grand romantic myth, so he wished away the boy he loved and let fate (which is actually his own negativity) sweep him away into a life of frustration and disappointment. Yet when he’s faced with losing Vero Roseto, he breaks his self-imposed curse and fights to save it. In doing so, he gets a second chance with Ben. I couldn’t save my family’s house, but through fiction, I gave myself a second chance. Through the safety of Grant’s fiction, I stumbled onto perspectives of my family and what happened that summer that I would’ve never accessed if I had told a straight-up memoir. I accessed emotions I could’ve never reached telling my own story. My theater professor once said that to cry in a scene, don’t picture your dead cat dead, picture him alive. That’s what I did. Vero Roseto is my family’s deceased home, forever living and vibrant and open for the next generation.
As luck would have it, Cursed Boys and Broken Hearts releases just a few weeks before the 25th anniversary of my grandmother’s death. If she’s reading this, or watching me type, I’m sorry your house is gone, but I did my best with Vero Roseto. For the rest of you, if there’s a Vero Roseto you lost, put it in a story and make it live again. Writing is the closest thing we have to a magic wish.
Get your copy of Cursed Boys and Broken Hearts by Adam Sass here.