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Your New School Library: Queer tales from debut authors (and more!)

Your New School Library is a new column of book reviews that will highlight the expanding role of lesbian, bisexual, transgender and strong female characters in literature for children and young adults today. Once a month, we’ll tell you about books that help young girls be awesome.

My reading recommendations for this month include two outstanding novels by debut authors and another solid tale from queer-YA queen Julie Anne Peters. All three somehow deal with loss and grief – but don’t worry; there are funny bits, too.

A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend, Emily Horner, Dial Books (2010)

As the title implies, we meet our protagonist, Cass, while she is still in the process of mourning the sudden death of her childhood best friend, Julia, in a car accident. Julia was one of those brilliant geniuses who, in addition to her smarts, also possessed a sharp sense of humor and natural social graces. The type of person who is able to attract both the popular kids and the geeks. The type of person we all wish we were, but whom we only actually meet in life occasionally. 

Cass’ process of dealing with her grief is two-fold. Her personal journey is a literal, two-wheeled one: she gets on her bike, headstrong and illogical, and starts to ride from their Illinois town to California, Julia’s ashes secured in Tupperware on the back, so she can take Julia to all those places they talked about going, that she never got to see, to the ocean.

The other exercise in grief involves drama, ninjas, and the rest of Julia’s closest friends back home when Cass finally returns. They discover that prior to her death, Julia had been working in a serious way on a project they had all only just joked about, one of those crazy ideas that you conjure up with friends but that no one actually normally carries out – unless you are one those funny, brilliant genius types. This idea was a musical entitled Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad, an idea born of a typical movie night with Julia and their friends. After viewing Rent and a Japanese ninja film, Zatoichi, back-to-back, Julia had the sudden, important realization that there needed to be a musical about ninjas.

“And there would be a song called ‘Seasons of Blood.'”

(See? Funny bits.)

When Julia’s boyfriend, Ollie, discovers Julia’s libretto and score to Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad – along with the notes: “P.S. THIS IS NOT A REAL DRAFT, SO STOP READING, OKAY? P.P.S. I REALLY MEAN IT, WAIT FOR THE SECOND DRAFT OR I KILL YOU.” – he decides that it must be put into production and performed to a real audience, and it must be done by them, the ones who knew Julia best, even if she unfortunately never had time to make that second draft. Cass, never an actress, takes up residence in the basement making props and helping with costumes and sets, along with Heather – the arch-nemesis girl who publicly made fun of Cass for being a dyke all through middle school, who has maybe changed a little, who Cass against all her instincts may or may not develop a little crush on maybe.

The narrative jumps back and forth between the solo bike trek and the ninja musical production, which can be slightly jarring until you get used to it, although I might have felt this way just because my own disposition pulls me more towards the solo bike trip portion, and I kept wanting even more of her lonely, athletic angst. The Ninja Deathsquad storyline though, interestingly, is not only frequently a nice bit of comic relief at the same time that it’s full of sincere heart, but ends up being where Cass really finds herself some peace.

I knew I would like Cass from one of the first pages when, after Heather throws her a CD wallet and implores her to pick something, she deadpans, 

“But I wasn’t going to go pawing through her CD collection so that we could have a secret musical soulmates thing just because we both liked Arcade Fire. So I handed it back to her.” 

She’s a realistic mix of jaded without being pretentious, intensely smart and independent while also insecure and constantly wondering if the people around her are only being nice to her out of pity. Her sexuality, as well, is nuanced in what I thought to be a lovely way. Her lesbianism is never really a question and isn’t the main point of the story. This isn’t a coming out story or a “Do I like boys or girls??” story; it’s simply a “What do all these emotions inside my head and heart mean relative to the people in my life and who I am?” story, particularly when it comes to her true emotions and her grief over Julia.

“I just wanted to find some meaning in the strange things running around inside my heart. I wanted to be able to kneel down with my face in the dirt like an archaeologist and brush the dust off these memories and find out what was true underneath them. It seemed like the least I deserved, when everyone else seemed to have found their direction right away, while I was left wandering.” 

Horner writes beautifully and honestly, shining light on both the pain and the joy that can come with grief and figuring out who you are just a little bit better, and I more than look forward to reading more from her. By the end of this novel, I felt genuinely moved, which may sound a bit cheesy, but that is what a book is supposed to do, and it was a reaction I hadn’t actually felt with a novel in far too long.

She Loves You, She Loves You Not … , Julie Anne Peters, Little, Brown and Company (2011)

Alyssa is having one heck of a not-the-greatest-ever summer. First bummer: her girlfriend breaks up with her and gets with one of Alyssa’s best friends. Second bummer: her dad finds out she’s gay in the WORST WAY YOU CAN FIND OUT YOUR DAUGHTER’S GAY, disowns her, and sends her halfway across the country from Virginia Beach to live with her mom in Colorado. Her mom abandoned Alyssa as a child and has had little to no contact with her for years, so understandably Alyssa isn’t super-psyched about this sudden, strange arrangement.

The small Colorado town which is suddenly Alyssa’s world, however, slowly but surely sneaks small tendrils into Alyssa’s heart, mainly through characters she meets through the waitressing gig she secures at the one good breakfast place in town. There’s my favorite, the crotchety proprietor, Arlo (because who doesn’t love an outwardly-gruff yet inwardly-loving old guy?); the mysterious and strong fellow-dykey-waitress, Finn; and the other lovable small-town regulars who fill the restaurant’s seats each morning.

As the summer passes, Alyssa works to get over the heartache of her ex while simultaneously falling into what may be another foolish relationship with Finn, who not only isn’t fully comfortable in her sexuality but has never hidden her intentions to leave town once she gets enough cash saved. In addition, Alyssa deals with the grief of losing a father who refuses to come around, while she cautiously attempts to get to know and get past judgment of a mother who she really hardly knows at all.

There were a few things that I had a little trouble with in this novel, the main one being that Alyssa spends so much time being heartbroken over her ex, yet her ex seems immature and irritating from what we know of her, so it’s hard as a reader to really feel empathy with her heartache. (My reaction throughout was basically: “Her?”) I also started this novel immediately after finishing A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend, and the writing styles are quite different. I had been so in love with Horner’s style, it was personally slightly jarring.

But Peters continues to do what she does so well in many other aspects. First, in addition to being a wonderful ball of sass, Alyssa never doubts her sexuality for a moment, and while she obviously hurts over her father’s rejection, she never wallows in shame. She’s not shy about pursuing Finn or sharing who she is with pretty much anyone. Essentially, it is lovely to have teen protagonists who are super confident in their super-lesbo identities. And without being overly graphic, Peters is also never afraid to describe the sexual desires those super-lesbo teens indulge in.

More than anything, the diversity in this book was my favorite thing about it; there were quite a few topics brought up that I hadn’t seen before in queer YA. Arlo (my favorite) is in a wheelchair. Finn is Native American. And Alyssa’s mother earns part of her living by dancing at a strip club, a profession which causes Alyssa to first harshly view her mother as a whore before she reaches a gentler understanding. In the end, this is a feel-good book that confronts hard issues but still leaves you cheering for Alyssa with a smile.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Emily M. Danforth, Balzer + Bray (2012)

My expectations of this book were already high due to positive buzz from Malindo Lo and others, and let me tell you: I was not let down, not once. Throughout the entire book, I knew that this reading experience was different, so much more epic, than queer YA reading experiences I’d had in the past, but I didn’t know quite how to tie that feeling down into words. What I eventually came up with – and I don’t mean this to be derogatory towards other YA novels at all – is this: this book is simply so much more ambitious than most YA novels, in the way that it aims to capture not just one experience or one storyline, but the story of Cameron Post’s entire youth life. It feels big, 470 pages big, and it is masterfully rendered.

The grief that dominates this story appears in the first line of the book.

The afternoon my parents died, I was out shoplifting with Irene Klausen.

That is one whopper of an opening line.

Her parents’ death (again, via car accident) coincides with Cameron’s first childhood love with Irene Klausen in middle school (I think I was twelve!), the love that, while Irene quickly disappears from Cameron’s life to another town and changes indeterminably in her mysterious distance, feels more authentic and true than almost anything else that follows. Throughout the rest of the novel, even when she’s not mentioned, even if you are unsure of whether Cameron will ever see her again, you almost feel Irene’s presence and her importance to everything.

Then there’s Lindsey, the Experienced One, savvy in lesbian culture and lingo often to pretentious heights. I mean, she’s from Seattle, which seems a world away to Cameron, who lives in a small town in Montana, perhaps one of the least-friendly environments in which to grow up as a lesbian. Lindsey is a brief flame but continues to be a steady friend to Cameron, a sort of rock of lesbian inspiration, even when Cameron doesn’t need it.

And then there is Coley Taylor. Just something about Coley’s name makes you nervously bite your lip and think, This girl is going to be big. She’s the beautiful, perfect, supposedly-straight heartbreaker cowgirl, who I couldn’t stop picturing as Lyla Garrity from Friday Night Lights. She’s that girl the whole town is charmed by, the one you kind of want to hate from the start but who finds ways to seem like a real human being at enough points that you just can’t hate her-at least at the beginning.

And then there is everything after Coley Taylor. I fear I have already told too much about this story, but since I’ve come this far, I’ll tell you that what comes after Coley is something called God’s Promise Christian School & Center for Healing, run by one Reverend Rick and a real bitch named Lydia.

The way Danforth deals with faith and Christianity in this novel is so interesting and lovely. Cameron possesses the ability to be angry without being bitter, to be clear-headed and never doubt who she is, and to know all the things that are wrong while still having empathy and compassion and a type of admiration of the good Christian people around her. 

Even way before God’s Promise, she describes the push-and-pull of influences in her life that hover over her, while she still never truly questions the reality of her sexuality:

[Lindsey] started me in on the language of gay; she sometimes talked about how liking girls is political and revolutionary and counter-cultural, all these names and terms that I didn’t even know that I was supposed to know, and a bunch of other things I didn’t really understand and I’m not sure that she did then, either – though she’d never have let on. I hadn’t ever really thought about any of that stuff. I just liked girls because I couldn’t help not to. I’d certainly never considered that someday my feelings might grant me access to a community of like-minded women. If anything, weekly services at Gates of Praise had assured me of exactly the opposite. How could I possibly believe Lindsey when she told me that two women could live together like man and wife, and even be accepted, when Pastor Crawford spoke with such authority about the wicked perversion of homosexuality?

Throughout the novel, whenever Cameron is able to transcend past numbness, she seems to be in a place of just trying to understand – trying to understand herself, and everyone else, and her past, and everything in between, even in such an extreme place as God’s Promise. Good friends and pot and alcohol help. There is a lot of pot. And a lot of movies rented on VHS. And redecorating an old dollhouse, a random and complex pursuit which is hard to explain but which was my favorite part of the book. 

In the end, it is not really her attraction to the ladies that has ever been a problem for Cameron; it is dealing with the loss of both her parents at once, just when she was starting to grow up, a loss that is gigantic and deep. Yet even with this grief, Cameron Post is funny and sincere and real, and I felt like I was a complete part of her world throughout the whole epic tale, a world that I was sad to see go when I reached the 470th page. Emily Danforth has crafted a masterpiece, and I truly cannot recommend it enough.

As a last note for this month, perhaps quite predictably, The Hunger Games movie has prompted a lot of discussion in the literary world and on the Internets about the current prominence of contemporary YA literature and the female role within it, with varying degrees of immaturity and brilliance written on the topic. Among many other articles, there were varied debates presented in the New York Times. And just this week, YA officially went fancy when The Atlantic started a new column dedicated to the adults-reading-YA phenomenon. Their first article in the series presented a list of the Greatest Girl Characters in Young Adult Literature, which was a pretty decent list aside from the fact that most of them were real old (I mean, Betsy-Tacy? Really?), and also technically children’s or juvenile fiction rather than Young Adult, with the exception of the one seemingly random inclusion of Liesel from The Book Thief. In other words, it seemed more like a nostalgic list of girl characters that Old White People grew up reading. While all the girl characters included are indeed wonderful and important to the genre of children’s literature, my hope is still that older readers will eventually realize the depth of the vastly more diverse and exciting range of books considered to be YA today, even beyond the sparkling few that become blockbusters.

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