Review by Abby Muth

“I found myself yearning for a book that gave a visceral, first-person account of a love sparking between two boys. Until that point, the queer books I’d read—if I could even find any—had mostly been tragic: death and heartbreak were never far away. Now I wanted to write the kind of book I wished had been around fifteen years earlier, a book like a warm glow, a book in which many shots get fired, though they never hit love itself.” 

– Edward van de Vendel, https://www.edwardvandevendel.nl/  

This is exactly the book Edward van de Vendel gives us with his YA novel, The Days of Bluegrass Love, a tender love story between two young men navigating their place in the world during a pivotal summer in the late 1990s. Originally published in Dutch in 1999 and translated into English by Emma Rault in 2022, the novel depicts the intensity of young love through the first-person account of a Dutch teenage boy. 

Tycho Zeling is meandering aimlessly through life. No plans for the future, no relationship, and no idea what or who he wants to be. Everything he has experienced up until now has just kind of happened to him. But the summer before he goes off to university, Tycho decides to take control of his life and signs up to be a junior camp counselor at an international summer camp in America. It’s here where he meets Oliver (well, it’s in the men’s bathroom in the airport before they depart), and his life is changed forever. Oliver is from Norway and, just like Tycho, is on his way to America to work at the summer camp. The two quickly strike up a friendship, and by the time they touch down in Nashville, Tennessee, they feel like old friends. Over the next few weeks, their relationship builds into an intense, all-consuming romance that threatens their status as junior counselors at the Little World camp.  

Translator Emma Rault not only brings a Dutch story of young love to an English-speaking audience but manages a translation of culture bound in the history of time. Though we have seen better representation of queer love stories in young adult literature in recent years, when this book was originally published in the Netherlands in the late 90s, it was still uncommon to see a novel about queer love that didn’t end in tragedy, as van de Vendel mentions on his website. Though a lot of the story focuses on how Tycho and Oliver’s relationship is perceived by the people around them, we also see how the two boys navigate the natural trials and tribulations of first love. As the novel progresses, Tycho begins to question his relationship with Oliver. He is left wondering if their love can survive time, distance, and external forces. By the end of the story, it’s time to face the facts: is their love meant to last, or will their time together merely become a memory of the past? 

At times, I found myself lost within the novel’s emotional prose, unsure of how we, as readers, arrived from one scene to the next. Was this, as they say, a case of getting lost in translation? Or perhaps this was intentional, because isn’t that the feeling of falling in love for the first time? Unsure of how you arrived at this new destination, only certain of the all-consuming emotions that led you there. What Renault’s translation of van de Vendel’s writing does perfectly is poetically capture the raw uncertainty of young love. 

The Days of Bluegrass Love
Written by Edward van de Vendel, translated by Emma Rault
2022 (1990), Levine Querido
ISBN: 978-164614-046-6
Reviews: Kirkus, Publishers Weekly

Abby is a student at Goldsmiths, University of London pursuing an MA in Translation with a Spanish to English language pair. She is writing her dissertation on YA literature in translation, along with translating an excerpt of a Mexican YA novel into English. Upon completion of her degree, Abby hopes to work in children’s publishing.

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GLLI’s 2024 International YA Literature Month has been curated by Dr Emily Corbett. She is a lecturer in children’s and young adult literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she leads the MA Children’s Literature: Theoretical Approaches to Children’s and Young Adult Literature programme. Her research focuses on the growth and development of YA from literary, publishing, and cultural perspectives. She is also General Editor of The International Journal of Young Adult Literature and was founding Vice President of the YA Studies Association. Her monograph, In Transition: Young Adult Literature and Transgender Representation (2024), is forthcoming with the University Press of Mississippi in June. You can find her contact details on her institutional website and connect with her on Twitter and Instagram via @DrEmilyCorbett.

Opinions expressed in posts on this site are the individual author’s and are not indicative of the views of Global Literature in Libraries Initiative.