malayapapaya's reviews
56 reviews

Writing this review a few months later, so I have a little distance from it, but wow wow wow. This was one of my first forays into queer fiction since coming out as a lesbian myself, and the way it explores the feeling of discovering this on your own in some isolation plus the intersection of this process with being an Asian woman was so so life-affirming as a fellow API lesbian. Even if the world is vastly different in many ways, there are so many emotions that resonated and hit in the best way. Also, reading about what sapphic culture was like back in the 1950s was really moving and made me so excited to move to a city and find my own queer community. I feel very grateful to not live in an environment where it's as risky as it was then, but it was so surreal to read this and know that Lily is around the same age my grandparents were and that this stuff is not that far off from the way things are now. The book treats all these subjects so beautifully while also being realistic about what the characters were facing in the time. It made me want to start learning about Asian and queer culture in San Francisco, which I have heard about but don't know too intimately.

lost focus/busy w school and had to return

Did not finish— Some typical fantasy violence that I was not in the right mental place for. Would like to return to it though!

just realized i wasn’t interested in YA tropes anymore, or that vibe/sort of speaker

Queer: A Graphic History is an easy-to-read introduction to the development and ideas of queer theory and how we can “queer” the world by disrupting norms and challenging binary ways of thinking (not just in terms of gender and sexuality, but also in the binaries of assimilationist/liberating, good/bad, etc). And so much more. I’ve had to take this book slowly some times I start it and other times I whip through it. It mentions the history while also pointing out a lot of the flaws of that history, and as someone who learned a lot of this material as I read the book (and who has no deeper knowledge to criticize from) really inspired me to want to learn and deconstruct more. (That sounds like a non-compliment lmao. The point is that it was a very motivating start for someone who wants to dig deeper). 

For anyone who wants specifics, here are some of the things I found most intriguing and marked for deeper reading later:
1) bell hooks’s work about marginality as resistance to the “norm” instead of a place of despair, and the place of compassion in activism
2) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work calling attention to the fact that our definition of sexual orientation categorizes only by gender when there are SO MANY OTHER THINGS it could categorize by
3) Jack Halberstam’s “The Queer Art of Failure”
4) Sari van Anders’s sexual configurations theory, connected to #2 above

I loved this and will be recommending it to everyone ever lol

I am a HUGE Red, White, and Royal Blue fan, and was really looking forward to this. I really loved the characters (Niko and Myla have my whole heart), many individual lines and scenes, and the love letter to NYC that this whole book was. However, the whole sci-fi bit never worked for me, which was disappointing because it was so much of the plot. It never suspended my disbelief enough, and had more plot convenience than I would have liked in a way that felt more like fanfiction than what you look for in a published book. I also felt like the integration of queer history was hyped up more than made sense based on how much they actually talked about it. I have a lot of faith in Casey McQuiston's writing if it focuses in more than this book did, but this one wasn't a favorite for me. Hoping the next one is a step up!!

Left aside because school got overwhelming, but would like to finish.