I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth The Trip.

Overview

John Donovan's novel follows Davy Ross, a withdrawn thirteen-year-old uprooted from his grandmother's home and relocated to New York City to live with a mother he barely knows. The move strips away the few certainties of his childhood, leaving him to navigate a new school, a strained household, and the ordinary loneliness of adolescence largely on his own.

Into that unsettled life comes a friendship with another boy that deepens into something Davy doesn't fully have language for. Donovan renders the relationship with restraint rather than spectacle, treating it as one strand in a larger story about a boy trying to figure out where he belongs.

The novel's quiet, observational style mirrors Davy's own hesitancy, favoring small domestic moments over melodrama as it traces how a single friendship can reorganize a young person's sense of self.

A Quiet Milestone in Young Adult Fiction

Published in 1969, the book is widely cited as the first novel marketed to teenagers to depict a same-sex attraction between its characters. That distinction has shaped its legacy more than any commercial success: it opened a door that young-adult publishing had not previously acknowledged existed, giving later writers a precedent for treating adolescent sexuality, including queer adolescent sexuality, as material worthy of serious literary attention rather than taboo.

Within Donovan's own body of work and within the broader arc of YA literature, the novel occupies an unusual position — more historically significant than widely read today, remembered chiefly as a point of origin. Its reception has long been entangled with the era it was written in, a moment when few cultural institutions were prepared to discuss adolescent same-sex feeling in any register, sympathetic or otherwise, and when simply depicting it was itself a notable act.

Why I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth The Trip. Has Been Challenged

Depictions of same-sex attraction sit at the center of the objections raised against this novel. Because the story treats a boy's feelings for another boy as a normal part of growing up rather than as a problem to be corrected, some challengers have argued that the book introduces young readers to a subject they consider inappropriate for school libraries or classrooms. The complaint tends to rest less on explicit content than on the mere presence of the relationship, and on discomfort with a narrative that declines to frame it as a crisis.

Concerns about the book's suitability for younger teen readers have also been raised alongside the sexuality theme, often tied to the broader unease the subject has provoked since publication. According to records maintained in this catalog, the novel has drawn a formal challenge in one state and one school district, a modest footprint that nonetheless reflects the persistent scrutiny faced by early works of queer representation in youth literature.