Mayor is a teenage boy with the wrong name, because he has no interest in becoming anything the world has planned for him. He doesn’t want to run things, fix things, or manage anything at all.
At the novel’s outset, Mayor’s idea of salvation is simple and intoxicating: the perfect girl. That fantasy supplies the book’s opening momentum, and Gary Marks handles it with precision. His comedic timing is sharp, and his sense of sensuality is notable for what it refuses—this is beauty as perception, not sex as voyeurism. The early pages glide on pleasure and promise, a joyride that feels wild and funny, and deliberately unsustainable.
Rather than trap his characters inside a postcard version of youth, Marks lets the story drift somewhere quieter and more demanding. That shift arrives through Darcy, Mayor’s teenage sister. She loves him without conditions, without expectation, without agenda—simply because he exists. In a novel this attuned to ambivalence and resistance, that kind of love becomes a steady, unsettling force.
When the book tightens, it does so without melodrama. Darcy does not force Mayor to grow up. He chooses to. And when he reaches that point, Darcy offers him something both simple and radical: a way forward that doesn’t require him to abandon himself. Instead, it’s a way in.
This is a novel written by someone who understands exactly how it feels to be young, gifted, and unwilling to surrender to the world. But it is also clear that Marks went down that road far enough to understand its limits, and its cost.
You don’t close Somewhere Beautiful thinking about what the title means. You recognize the place. And you understand why it’s the place you want to stay.
Link Here: https://www.garymarksmusic.com/books