Danny, a teenager living in a small Cape Breton town in the summer of 1994, has a secret. It’s a secret he keeps from his mother, father, and movie-quoting little sister, and from his high-school buds Kierce and Jay. But he doesn’t keep it from the reader: a couple of pages into Tom Ryan’s first novel, Danny admits to waking up “feeling horny and confused after a steamy dream about River Phoenix.” Yes, Danny is gay, though he doesn’t want to be and spends a lot of this short book trying not to be.

At the start of the summer, Danny gets a job at the town’s new restaurant. Though he must occasionally free himself from the clutches of ardent female classmates, he befriends Lisa, the cool waitress from out of town whose mother is in a mental hospital. While Danny’s attempts to force himself straight with Lisa end in failure, working in the restaurant does make him realize he has a knack for cooking. By the end of the summer, he has a better sense of not only who he is, but where he should be – a prestigious culinary school in Montreal.

Ryan’s novel has teen soap opera entanglements aplenty, a bit of drinking and skinny-dipping, some parental cluelessness, and a tentatively hopeful, though not overly saccharine, ending. There are no miracles or sudden changes of heart, just some small acts of generosity and kindness. Danny doesn’t even fully come out by the end, and there’s a suggestion that he can’t and won’t while he’s still living in his small town, but neither he nor the book makes a huge deal about that reality. For Danny, it’s enough that a few people understand him.

Ryan’s novel is not particularly ambitious, and some of the narrative loose ends might puzzle readers who prefer a more definitive resolution, but the realism adds to its considerable emotional impact. It gets better, the book suggests, just not all at once.