Her crush on the beautiful Alison leads to her wandering out in front of a bus, while mysterious Morgan is not the kind of cool Cat’s clique approve of. This is both zany and heart-warming, with further books on the way.įreja Nicole Woolf’s Never Trust A Gemini (Walker, £7.99) is also the first of a new series, focusing on horoscope-obsessed, love-obsessed Cat (“Scorpio Season is all about passion and I am very passionate about not dying alone,” the fourteen-year-old notes). On the first page, he’s thrilled to be kissing a boy at a party – until the boy’s head explodes.įleeing to a remote town doesn’t keep his best friend from tracking him down and, soon, they’re uncovering a sinister conspiracy, complete with genre-savvy commentary about not going into basements or touching any “magical talismans, ancient sarcophagi or tubes of alien goo”. His feelings get the better of him – literally.
While the line resonates with Steven’s semi-closeted identity, it is overtly about the magical powers that he can’t control. “You can’t help the way you were made,” seventeen-year-old Steven is told gently in David Fenne’s debut, Overemotional (Ink Road, £8.99). This is a more solemn work than Green’s usual fare but still ultimately uplifting and celebratory. It’s a particularly powerful experience given that his previous ideas of young gay men have been informed by the newspapers, where “they are despised, and dirty, and usually end up dead”. There is someone “like him” in his very own school – and writing back leads to discovering a boy who “showed me that life could be so saturated with vibrant colour it could make you breathless”. In a small town in the middle of nowhere (“if you do die of boredom, please try not to cause a scene”), Jamie suspects his yearnings for boys go beyond friendship but can’t quite articulate it to himself.Ī librarian breaking the rules to slip him a novel – Aidan Chambers’s excellent Dance On My Grave – in which two teenage boys fall in love serves as his awakening, especially as there are handwritten notes in the margins. His latest novel takes place in 1994, when Section 28 prevented teachers in the UK from “promoting” homosexuality (in Ireland, this has typically been covered under the term “Catholic ethos”). Green, best known for writing very funny gay love stories, has had his own fraught experiences with a more familiar version of the morality police, the sort who would prefer there were no queer books at all. The importance of queer love stories for teenagers, in an era of book bans and challenges, is made pointedly clear in Simon James Green’s Boy Like Me (Scholastic, £8.99).
Simon James Green has had his own fraught experiences with a more familiar version of the morality police
“Even if it’s not technically queerbaiting,” she thinks, “it’s definitely appropriation.” As “a known people pleaser”, she worries that her attraction to Lili’s friend Tessa – with whom there is much delightful flirting – is another manifestation of this. This experience is echoed in the book through an actress who comes out and is criticised for not doing it sooner, as well as through Imogen’s constant fretting over being “wrong” in some way. the Homosapiens Agenda (adapted into Love, Simon). Honestly, I’m doing this because I’ve been scrutinised, subtweeted, mocked, lectured and invalidated just about every single day for years and I’m exhausted.”īecky Albertalli is best known for Simon Vs. Albertalli came out as bisexual in 2020 in response to constant and cruel discussion of the topic online, noting: “This doesn’t feel good or empowering, or even particularly safe. Imogen, Obviously (HarperCollins, £8.99) is the latest novel from Becky Albertalli, best known for Simon Vs the Homo sapiens Agenda (adapted into Love, Simon) and explicitly draws on her experience writing queer characters as a presumed straight woman. The reference to the film, an account of a clueless girl discovering her attraction to other girls, is one of many early hints that there’s more going on here for Imogen. Her friend Gretchen frequently lectures her over her “problematic” behaviour, such as remarking she “would kiss” Clea DuVall as Graham in the cult classic But I’m A Cheerleader. That she worries about this reflects not just understandable adolescent self-absorption but the policing of identity in her peer group. And how it seems so intuitive for people.” When Imogen goes to visit her newly-out best friend at college, she is worried that she will be viewed as “a relic of Lili’s heteronormative small-town childhood” and be the awkward straight girl in a sea of queer pride. “The truth is, I’ve never quite been able to pin it down.
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