Doing it

Overview

Doing It follows Dino, Jonathon, and Ben, three British teenagers whose friendship is the one constant amid a churn of crushes, misunderstandings, and mounting sexual pressure. Each boy carries a different version of the same anxiety: Dino wants a conquest and mistakes it for a relationship, Jonathon is terrified of intimacy with a girl he actually loves, and Ben is trapped in a secret entanglement with a teacher that he can't yet recognize as exploitation rather than romance.

Melvin Burgess writes their voices with a comic, unsparing honesty, letting the boys be crude, scared, and self-deceiving by turns. The humor doesn't soften the book's underlying seriousness; it's used to expose how little these three actually understand about sex, consent, or each other, even as they perform confidence for one another.

The result is less a plot-driven story than a portrait of a specific, awkward stretch of adolescence, one where bravado and ignorance collide with real feeling, and where the boys' friendship is tested by the very experiences they thought would prove their maturity.

A Different Kind of Coming-of-Age Story

Burgess had already unsettled expectations for young-adult fiction with his earlier novel about heroin addiction among teenagers, and Doing It extends that same refusal to soften difficult material for a young audience. Where much YA fiction of the era approached teenage sexuality through the lens of romance and emotional consequence, Burgess writes from inside male adolescent anxiety itself, treating ignorance, peer pressure, and misplaced bravado as subjects worth taking seriously rather than punchlines to be moralized away.

The novel's inclusion of a relationship between a student and a teacher gives it an additional charge, forcing readers to sit with a situation the character himself misreads, which invites scrutiny of how consent and power are understood, or misunderstood, by teenagers navigating desire without much guidance. Critical response to the book has been divided along similar lines to Burgess's other work: some readers and reviewers have praised its candor and its refusal to condescend to teenage readers, while others have questioned whether its comic tone risks minimizing the more troubling elements of its plot.

Why Doing It Has Been Challenged

Much of the friction around Doing It centers on where, and for whom, a book this candid belongs on a shelf, with disagreement over whether its content is appropriate for the middle and high school collections where it has typically been found. The novel has been challenged or removed in one state and one school district tracked in this catalog.

The substance of the objections tends to focus on the novel's explicit descriptions of teenage sexual activity and its blunt, often crude dialogue, which some parents and administrators have argued exceeds what is appropriate for a school-age readership regardless of literary intent. The subplot involving a student and a teacher has drawn particular concern, with critics worried that its comic framing could be read as minimizing or normalizing an exploitative relationship rather than condemning it. Taken together, these objections reflect a broader unease with a book that treats teenage sexual confusion as material for honest, sometimes uncomfortable comedy rather than cautionary example.