Marlie, a Toronto teen, starts keeping a journal in August 1990 and keeps it up through October 1992. In that time she obsesses over the the Pretenders, learns to play guitar, discovers riot grrrl, starts a band, makes and loses friends, falls in love with a girl, falls in love with a boy, sees a lot of shows, and basically embraces and releases her inner fierceness.
As you can imagine, this zine pretty much had me at the title. The contents are 20+ pages of colored-in stick-figure old women engaged in nefarious activities. Some of them are mild: “When I am an old woman I will throw things out of trees at people.” Some are gratuitous: “When I am an old woman I will use impractical implements of destruction for everyday purposes.” (Accompanied by an illustration of a crazy-haired lady taking a hatchet to a lone mushroom on a counter top. Some are what you might expect from an eccentric elderly lady: “When I am an old woman I will cheat rampantly at Bingo.” (I’m looking at you, Sister Loud Melissa.) And others are quite illegal: “When I am an old woman I will take vacations soley for the purposes of gambling and drug-smuggling.”
This is a book club book, so I don’t want to say much about it before I get the chance to talk about it with Celia. And that’s fine, because I don’t have a ton to say about it. A young goth punk alcoholic in recovery, whose father died a few years prior discovers Debbie Harry, falls in love, and realizes he’s a transvestite. It’s an area that’s not covered adequately in the literature, but I’m not sure it’s covered adequately here, either.
Why must Olivia be a teenager in love with her finishing school headmistress? First published in 1949, it was a hot item. Per The Christian Science Monitor, libraries couldn't get it onto the shelves. Comparing Olivia and 1984, also recently published, Eric Forbes-Boyd writes in the CSM on July 21, 1949:
And Then They Were Nuns is different from other lesbian separatist utopia novels because the utopia is a monastery, and the lesbians are nuns--except for the one who serves as the priest. I'm sorry; it's hard not to tease such a set-up. And Then They Were Nuns actually is more or less like other lesbian separatist utopia novels, not that that's a bad thing.
Lesbian pulp always seems like a better idea than it actually is. This stuff might have been great in the 50s, but I think nowadays it's probably best read aloud or performed as camp/melodrama.
It was different when I could say it wasn't this way, that I was bisexual and all that rot. Bisexual--that's sort of like succotash, isn't it? Only this succotash hasn't got any corn in it. It's straight beans!"
I'm possibly being insensitive to the bravery of this "story once told in whispers now frankly, honestly written," (not to mention to bisexuals by including the above quote) but it just didn't grab me.
Jesse Bennett is an incidentally queer teen with a whack job mom and social status anxiety. I like that the lesbian storyline, while important is only one of the three major themes of this adult, but suitable-for-young-adults novel. Jesse is a likable and believable character in a likable and believable novel. It's a pity I don't have anything brilliant to say about the book because it's a likely candidate for next year's favorites list.
A history of the hey day of riot grrrl, Girls to the Front reads more like a biography of the movement, like a biography of an ex-lover on whom the author has some distance but still identifies with to a large extent. It is a loving, but not uncritical portrait of the rise of riot grrrl and its best known players. A professional (and very talented) writer, Sara Marcus includes herself only in the introduction and briefly in the epilogue. Given my own bias toward personal narratives and the every grrrl, I might have liked a little more about Sara's experiences and adventures, but I still found the book to be educational, inspiring, compelling, and enraging--in a good way.
Student council president Holland Jaeger was finds herself less interested in boyfriend Seth than in transfer student Cece. Cece is totally open about her sexuality, but makes some mistakes as she helps Holland understand hers. Of the three queer YA novels I've read lately, this was the most affective (i.e tear-jerking). Strangely though I didn't love the writing, I found the book deeply compelling (except the day I accidentally left it at work and had nothing to read on the subway home). In addition to being a coming out story, it's also about parent/child relationships, learning to be open-minded about people from wacky subcultures (e.g. goths), and finding oneself as an artist. I'd say more, but there are too many spoilers to worry about.
This time the lesbian teen is a different type of orthodox: Cuban-American from Miami. Laura gets busted with a love note from her girlfriend the last day of junior year and gets kicked out of her house for being a degenerada. Luckily she's got a best friend with and understanding mima who take her in. The book is Laura's journey out of the closet. I found it a little too much, like the author was trying to hard to pack everything in, and the cover reminds me of what they did to Leilaina's film in Reality Bites, turning it from a thoughtful documentary about lost youth into an MTV high concept/low content pre-reality show reality show. That's just the cover and crazy fontage I'm vilifying. The story is fine, but one of those YA novels that is better left to its intended audience instead of middle-aged ladies like me. It has plenty going for it: transgender and genderqueer characters, Cuban Spanish idioms, sexy round chicks, and standing up to homophobic bullies.
