I don’t have a pithy start to this book review. This book hurt my feelings in a way I find difficult to describe.
The novel follows a young woman, raised in white bread suburban New York, close enough to go to parties and clubs as an underage teen, but far enough away to remain sheltered and away from the Queer and non-white history of the city – and by extension, of America, who is figuring out her sexual identity, and her feelings about her upbringing.
While exploring this, the protagonist, Savannah, is coping with severe trauma as a result of a sexual assault by her best friend’s older brother when she was 16. This trauma undercuts her friendships, her potential relationships, and cements to Savannah that she doesn’t want to continue to grow into someone from her home town, who is concerned with getting married and having children and being a “perfect housewife.” Her childhood best friend, Izzy, serves as Savannah’s foil in the narrative, about to get married at 19 to her boyfriend who is in the military, and can’t figure out how to have a conversation with a queer or nonbinary person without being offensive.
While I think the novel and the author could have handled some of the issues with Izzy and Savannah differently, it so greatly reflected by own experience of having grown up a closeted queer kid in an extremely white environment (I am white), and the unlearning I had to do when I left that environment and went to college.
I think the thing that the novel did the best was the way in which Savannah had to learn to meld her two “identities” – the Savannah at home vs. the Savannah at college. This is a concept I relate to heavily, and really enjoyed reading about, even if it did make my heart hurt a little (or a lot) for Savannah and little Charlotte.