#anna birch

[queer-books-bracket]

Round 2

I Kissed Alice- Anna Birch

The Sunbearer Trials- Aiden Thomas

Voting ended onFeb 13, 2023

[lgbtqreads]

Happy Lesbian Day of Visibility!

Happy Lesbian Day of Visibility!

This post only includes books that were not featured in past posts. For even more visibly lesbian goodness, check out 2020’s and 2019’s too! Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person…

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[lgbtqreads]

New Releases: July 2020

New Releases: July 2020

Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron (7th)

It’s 200 years after Cinderella found her prince, but the fairy tale is over. Teen girls are now required to appear at the Annual Ball, where the men of the kingdom select wives based on a girl’s display of finery. If a suitable match is not found, the girls not chosen are never heard from again.

Sixteen-year-old Sophia would much rather marry Erin, her…

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[queer-books-bracket]

Round 1

We Deserve Monuments- Jas Hammonds

I Kissed Alice- Anna Birch

Voting ended onFeb 11, 2023

[w-wquotes]

"There are always two sides to every story, honey."

"I know. But have you ever, like... only seen your side? And then finally you realize they have a reason to hate you, too?"

"Course. That's being human."

- I kissed Alice, Anna Birch

[ahb-writes]

Book Review: ‘I Kissed Alice’

I Kissed Alice by Anna Birch My rating: 4 of 5 stars However impractical the prescience of falling in love absent the contextual connective tissue that typically validates relationships on the fly, the entangling of a pair of bratty Alabama teens seems ripe for such an upheaval. There are no kinds words. There are no accidental encounters. There are few repeated, evidentiary motifs that might implicate one young woman being primed for her fated partner and vice versa. Indeed, the romance at the heart of I KISSED ALICE consists of a great deal of awkward fortune, both good and bad. Iliana Vrionides is defensive, arrogant, uncompromising, and short. She relishes conflict and nurtures a distaste for inherited authority. She is poor. Rhodes Ingram is unassumingly bold, consistently on task, and very tall. She enjoys being right all of the time. She also feels too much. She is rich. Such is the stage for two intensely skilled young women wiling away the hours of their final year in secondary education at a specialty arts school. Their personal and academic conflicts are inevitable from the onset (e.g., last-ditch, end-of-semester scholarship), but their accidental romance isn't quite so clear-cut. Behold, enter the world of fanfiction. I KISSED ALICE pushes the conceit of two unlikable characters slowly and grudgingly working their way toward likability to its furthest edge. And from a literary perspective, the book presents an interesting gamble. It's a young queer romance, yes. But one must dig through the sour to arrive anywhere close to the sweetness at the end. Readers will patently resist either liking or caring about the vibrating energy of Iliana, no matter how legitimate her creative impulses, because the young woman is inscrutably selfish. How are readers supposed to sympathize with an idiot who self-destructs every opportunity and every relationship she encounters? The author takes on this challenge by forcing Iliana to barf up the consequences of her actions in real time. The results, as one imagines, are far from pretty. Illiana, in short, is "the kind of bitch that never settles for anything" (p. 137). And whereas Iliana is initially written beyond pity, it's a different case for Rhodes. The young woman is terrified of the expectations set out for her by meddling family members and intellectually fecund friends. Rhodes is pitiable. Too pitiable. Actually, her continuous, slow-moving, emotional breakdown is so profoundly predictable that one can't help but wonder if most of the anxiety she encounters is of her own doing ("All I want to do is be able to save myself," p. 76). Alas, how are readers meant to root for a character whose deficiencies are gut-wrenchingly obvious, but the solutions of which are beyond the character's immediate control? The author addresses this web of depression by forcing Rhodes to acknowledge, to herself, that it's okay to let go. It's okay to be the not-best at something. It is no surprise, one finds, that almost every meaningful quote in the novel comes from Rhodes's point-of-view chapters. I KISSED ALICE levers communal creativity (e.g., collaboration on a webcomic), disaffection with family bonds (e.g., too involved, uninvolved), and ping-pong emotional support (e.g., best friend ultimatums) to frame the perpetual dramatic irony filling this novel from cover to cover. This is important. The characters conjured for this narrative are deliberately unlikable and difficult to cozy up to. As such, the author must orchestrate a complex network of finicky situations, happy inconveniences, and casual reflections on budding romance to convince both character and reader that this so-called love thing is worth the energy. Is it possible for Iliana to fall in love with a girl she's never met? Whom she's only chatted with online for half of a year? Maybe. Iliana's brashness has both earned and lost her future more times than she can count. And she's poured her heart out to her online paramour more so than anyone else she knows. Is it reasonable for Rhodes to truthfully care more about a relationship that only existed because of her talent with a stylus? Maybe. Rhodes has grown lazy and her professional future is in peril. The only beacon of creativity she can easily and readily sight is the webcomic she developed with a certain anonymous someone. These mimicking insecurities run parallel until they don't, and the ensuing collision is fraught with frayed nerves. Interestingly, I KISSED ALICE doesn't rely on misunderstanding to propel its characters forward. The book flicks into position several variables that inflame the ambitions of characters who are exceedingly prone to misunderstanding: adults behaving badly, best friends who think nothing of betrayal, not-so-best-friends who unerringly support thinking nothing of betrayal, the hidden pain of refusing to admit wrongdoing, the visible pain of harboring anger over circumstances clawed into being by the fingernails of others. I KISSED ALICE is a good book for patient readers. The novel's conclusion is easy to discern but isn't too obvious, which is nice, and the characters emerge though not entirely unscathed by the rudiments of their failing, flailing, emerging sense of adulthood. This isn't the type of book one can discern the whole of without actually reading the whole book. There are a handful of quirks that go unanswered (e.g., Iliana's parents are 44 years older than she is; a genuine conversation on late parenting is ignored). The author's vagueness regarding the girls' sexuality is sometimes too clever for its own good, nearly spoiling the romantic fun (e.g., Rhodes is bisexual and claims to have "physically been with exactly zero [girls]" but "can count the number of times [she's] had sex with anyone on one hand [with] maybe two or three fingers. Max," pp. 20, 140). And there's a befuddling reference to a comically terrible teen horror-suspense flick from 20 years ago (hardly anybody saw Swimfan when it was originally released). Nevertheless, the complications brought into focus by the arrogance and aloofness of characters who should know better are sometimes sharply and sometimes messily and sometimes unexpectedly solved by the very characters who started them.

Book Reviews || ahb writes on Good Reads

[ahb-writes]

People will never stop asking for things. If I want to spend my life as an artist, I'll spend my life creating what other people expect of me.

"Rhodes Anne Ingram" (I Kissed Alice by Anna Birch)

[lunastnquarterly]

Review: I Kissed Alice, Anna Birch

Review: I Kissed Alice, Anna Birch

I’ve talked at length before about how much I love when YA queers and subverts its own tropes and clichés. And I couldtalk about it even further: the importance of diverse stories that reflect the diverse readership of YA cannot be overstated. I could write whole essays, in fact, about the significance of seeing familiar tropes—which historically have mostly been for and about white, cisgender…

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