The book is mostly a melancholy rehash of two lives. One sad the other angry. Neither of them can find peace and happiness with their lives as there are in the present. They either live in the past and see only the mistakes they made or long for the past and are bitter that it no longer exists. The title says it all for one of the two main characters - all he wants is to get back to his younger days when all he did was party. Reading I wanted to slap some sense into both of the main characters and tell them to move on, get a life and grow up. They are both man-children. The best description of this book can be found about three quarters of the way through the text in the final letter that Sean writes to Oscar. Is so clearly identifies that both of the main characters are stuck in how it was and feel only anger or regret. For me the looking back and making so little process in finding peace in the present was not what I was hoping for. The title says it all and I should have paid more attention. I would have been more prepared for the core of the message and maybe decided not read the book.

Read if you: Want a unique LGBTQ+ story featuring a character struggling with generational issues dealing with identity, dating, marriage, family, and more.

Librarians/booksellers: Purchase for readers that want LGBTQ+ fiction that aren't centered on coming-out stories.

Many thanks to Algonquin Books and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Let’s Get Back To the Party is a portrait of two strikingly different yet all-too-familiar contemporary gay men. First there’s Sebastion, the quiet high school teacher who develops an increasingly unhealthy obsession with one of his teenage students after being abruptly left by his boyfriend of three years. While the obsession never reaches Lolita-like levels, it does reveal the inherited generational divide that keeps many gay men trapped from true freedom while allowing others to live unencumbered by shame and societal expectations. Then there’s Oscar, handsome, good-looking, and always on the apps scrolling for the next one-night stand. Oscar disgusts at the parade of gay men rushing the alter but is upended by a chance meeting with an older gay writer (think Alan Hollinghurst), whose novels of gratuitous and free-spirited sex in 1970s New York City have earned him a rapt audience. Oscar is faced with his own generational divide, forced to choose between the current march of modern history or the tide of the past that threatens to leave him behind. While the metaphor here can be a bit too literal, and the “will they or won’t they” flirtation between Oscar and Sebastian doesn’t really add up, author Zak Salih offers a grounded and often sobering look at what it means to be a gay man right now. The novel stresses the importance of honoring the past and lives of the gay men of this country -without romancing those lives’ struggles-as well as need to support the next, more hopeful, generation.