High-school student Wallace Witherspoon, Jr., heir-apparent to directorship of funerals in Seaville, Long Island, and Sabra St. Amour, teenage goddess of daytime television soap opera, spend a star-crossed summer getting to know themselves through each other and through the other wildly overdrawn characters in [I'll Love You When You're More Like Me]. Nasty Harriet Hren has used "female" tactics to get herself engaged to Wally. Wally's gay friend, Charlie, has just come out of the closet. Sabra's mother, Madame St. Amour, is vicariously living out her own aborted stage career through Sabra….

The theme, "I'll love you when you are more like me," is … borne out by all relationships except the one existing between Wally and Sabra….

Wally and Sabra share happy endings, each taking active steps towards the particular future they yearn for. Charlie, in the meantime (although not hit by a car or otherwise killed off as gay men tend to be in adolescent fiction), chooses to bury himself forever in a small town where no gay life-style is possible. So while we finally have a book with a nice straight-boy, gay-boy friendship, the future promises a sex life only to straight Wally. (p. 14)