The Queer Girl is Going to Be Okay

Thank you to NetGalley + Levine Querido for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

quote will be edited in once the book is published

I first have to say this book packs a lot in less than 300 pages! Queer identity, queer love, the change and anxiety that comes with the transition from high school to college, and different family situations that all have their fair share of struggles. And my favorite part is that our main characters are all poc which I absolutely love to see, more of this please!!!

Our main character, Dawn is a transgender girl that aspires to be a filmmaker and wants to experience true, authentic love in the sense that she wants someone that loves her for her. On top of that, she has this awesome documentary she's working on for a film scholarship, you called it “The Queer Girl is Going to Be Okay” and if she wins the scholarship she will be able to go to school for film on a full ride and be able to take care of her father who is struggling with depression.

With a premise like that, I was captivated because I am also an aspiring filmmaker so reading the snippets of the documentary dialogue was absolutely feeding that part of my brain.

However, Edie and Georgia's storylines were not as fleshed out as Dawn's which I found rather disappointing seeing as they both had different struggles of their own and they weren't developed further during the course of the story. Edie has strict Christian parents that are super against queerness and this affects Edie's relationship with Ben who is non-binary. Not only that but it affects the way Edie approaches and deals with problems because she wants to appease her parents because they talk highly of her as she's a great student. Georgia has a single mother who have what I call a Rory-Lorelai type of relationship but there's also layers to them that we got a glimpse of but it was again, never truly fleshed out. Georgia's relationship with her girlfriend, Jill was so beautiful to read but again, I was left wanting more. There wasn't a healthy balance between the three characters as the story is Dawn's story but when you have 2 other characters featured, there needs to be a way to drive their storylines forward without it feeling like the story has stopped. The pacing was way off, some times it would race forward but then we would be stuck in traffic as the pacing slowed down, in other words: the pacing was choppy.

Despite my critiques, I think this story definitely deserves a read through because of the sheer fact that it's about queer love (amongst other important themes!) and it features an all woman, poc main cast. There were several parts of the story that had me smiling and laughing, this friend group is something I wish I had back when I was in high school and I hope younger audiences can resonate with this story.