I read a couple of reviews comparing this favorably with "The Catcher in the Rye" (even one called it "essentially a homosexual Catcher in the Rye.")
I couldn't disagree more. I would much rather any young gay man read "Catcher" than this.
There's some pretty prose here, but the structure is all over the place, the events implausible and more tawdry than anything nearly as poignant as Salinger. "Catcher" is a story. ABOS is random snippets mostly focused on sexual escapades. A book solely focused on the sexual awakenings of a boy does not lend itself to jumping around a timeline. I wonder if the chapters were accidentally printed out of order the first time and they just left it that way?