Pulp

It's probably close to a 3.75, but I just couldn't rate it as 3 here.

I've never read a book by this author before but from the first time I saw the blurb, I was so fascinated by this story. Even though it's essentially YA, it didn't feel like the romances that I usually read but I really wanted to know what it was all about. However, now I'm not sure how I feel about it. I didn't want to put it down once I started because I was really engaged in the mystery, but it also didn't captivate me as much as I wanted it to.

In the current timeline, our main protagonist Abby is a high school senior trying to work on her project on 1950s lesbian pulp fiction. She has a lot of things going on in her life – she is still unable to deal with her breakup with Linh while trying to remain friends with her, her parents don't spend even a minute together at home anymore, her younger brother is acting out and getting into trouble and she hates the competitive nature of applying for colleges. All she wants to do is escape all these problems of hers and when she discovers one particular lesbian romance novel from 1956, she becomes obsessed with the characters and decides that she needs to uncover the true identity of the author. This obsession literally takes over her life and while I understood her struggle with being helpless about her home or love life, it did make her slightly petulant and very neglectful about her studies. I could feel for her desperation to keep things okay, but it also made me slightly unsympathetic towards her because of the way she went about it all.

The timeline in 1955 follows Janet, the author of Abby's new favorite novel and this was a very compelling look into the times. The wonder when Janet first discovers a lesbian novel herself (or even sees the word lesbian for the first time) or when she realizes that there are other people like her out in the world is captured beautifully. She can be a bit impulsive and sometimes even naive, probably due to her sheltered upbringing, but once she gets to know more about herself or others like her, she decides on her path forward and never wavers from her convictions. She is quite brave in that she wants to live a life being true to herself despite the whole world telling her that it is wrong and I was amazed at her strength in such a young age. Her story is definitely what kept me going with this book.

The writing is good but not enough to keep me engaged throughout. I preferred the 50s timeline because Janet was a much more intriguing protagonist and the stakes felt quite high in her narrative. Even when Abby is trying to find the mystery behind “Marian Love”, I wanted her to solve it as much as she did, but the way her character is written made the journey less enjoyable for me. There is also not a lot that happens for more than half of the book, but the last 25-30% is very exciting when the two timelines converge and definitely what makes the book a memorable read.

The amount of research that the author must have done also shows in every page and this was one of the most informative fiction books I've read in recent times. We get some great insight into the queer culture of the 50s, about the Lavender scare when scores of LGBT+ people were discriminated against and fired from their jobs for being immoral and subversive, and about the small communities that they still managed to form to support each other despite the whole world being against them. The two timelines also give us a picture about how far we have come in the fight for equality and how much more we have to do. I especially liked that Abby and her friends have the acceptance from their families which Janet never had, but how this also makes them more politically aware and engage in activism themselves.

This book may not hit the mark all the way through but I still think it's an important read and I would recommend it to everyone. It's also really an ode to the power of words and stories, and how the courage of authors to tell them can have an impact on so many others.