Edmund White's four previous books split neatly into two general categories—novels highly acclaimed for their polished prose … and nonfiction books on gay society…. A Boy's Own Story is a poignant combination of the two genres, a first-person novel … about a boy growing up homosexual in the 1950s, and written with the flourish of a master stylist. (pp. 75-6)

The story winds fluently through events of the narrator's youth. The boy is cursed with a maddening family…. The boy contends with a succession of friends, fantasies, bohemians, camp counselors, and schoolmasters, and a self-absorbed psychoanalyst.

This is a sympathetic evocation of a youth's faltering realization but ultimate acceptance of his homosexuality…. While the boy's emerging sexuality dominates the story, White has succeeded in demonstrating that this, however disquieting, is only one of the throes of his coming of age. It is an endearing portrait of a child's longing to be charming, popular, powerful, and loved, and of his struggles with adults, whom he discovers to be frequently inept and hypocritical—all the more engaging because it is told with such sensitivity and elegance. (p. 76)