gaybooks:

Overall rating: 8/10

Brief summary: Marin, a college freshmen, tries to prepare herself for a visit from Mabel, her best friend in high school. There’s a lot that went unsaid between them, especially after the loss of someone they both knew, and Marin has to find a way back to a place where she can tell Mabel what happened.

Writing style: The book is written in first person present tense. Marin is the narrator, and she’s a pretty reliable one, but the narration jumps back and forth in time in a few places, so while she sometimes brings up subjects, it might be chapters before those subjects or scenes are fleshed out. Additionally, the book is fairly introspective, as it deals with Marin’s grief and feelings of emptiness, so there are large chunks of the book without dialogue.

My opinion: I liked it. The book never has the word  ‘lesbian’ or ‘bisexual’ in it – in fact, it doesn’t have any labels at all – and while Marin does have a scene where she is worried about her grandfather’s reaction to her having spent a night with a girl, she never receives condemnation for it, and she never worries about whether or not it was right. I’m still not sure if that lack of labels is a good thing (because straight protagonists never label themselves as straight, either) or not, since Marin is going through a deep, quiet depression, and could use a community to turn to, as she isolated herself from the one she had when she lived in California.

Notable quotes:

“ I listened to the same heartbroken song the entire bus ride home, because it was still a summer when sadness was beautiful.”

“ These are all things that change a person. If we endure them and we aren’t changed, then something is wrong. “

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