content warnings: homophobia, death threats, discussions of forced outing, a character gets kicked out of her house because of her sexuality, mentions of conversion therapy, use of the f-slur

“He said that people like us, we get to choose our families. We get to choose the people around us, and I never thought about that before. If family is love, then the people we love are family.”

Hm, I definitely have some complicated feelings about this book. But before we get into that I would like to start this review by saying that this book does not have lesbian erasure. From what I can tell from the two minutes of research I did, there was an issue a lot of reviewers were having when the ARC of this came out because one of the lead's sexuality had been changed from lesbian to pansexual. However, this is not the case in the final copy. As far as I can tell, both the leads in this identify as lesbians.

Now, onto my complicated feelings. For context, while I've never seen or listened to the musical I'm well aware of its existence because I follow several musical nerds on Twitter and it was nominated for but didn't win a bunch of Tony's this year. I've always been interested in the musical, though, and now I want to listen to the soundtrack even more.

The Prom is about two teenage girls, Emma and Alyssa, who live in Edgewater, Indiana. They've been dating for a year and a half, and with their senior prom coming up they just want to be able to go to the prom together. But when the school finds out that Emma, the only one of the pair who's out, plans to take a girl to the prom, all hell breaks loose. There are protests, threats of the prom being shut down, and a group of former Broadway stars rolling into town to help.

This is an extremely short book (only a hair above 200 pages) and it moves. I read this in around an hour and a half, and that's me reading slowly. The plot is very fast-paced, to the point where by about halfway I wanted it to slow down and breathe. Obviously this is a novelisation of the musical but I feel like even when something's a novelisation it should still be able to stand on its own, whereas this felt like it was relying on you already knowing and loving the musical so you don't need it to slow down and let you have time to get to know the characters or setting.

Speaking of the characters... I was pretty meh on all of them. Most of them were pretty unmemorable, and that unfortunately includes the two leads. No one really has a personality outside of one (1) hobby they have. The only character I really got attached to was Emma's Nan, and that's just because she's a cool old lady who wants to fight for her granddaughter's rights.

Going back to the pacing, I think that also seriously hurt in regards to character development. There are several major side characters who are the cheerleaders/jocks and the ones who predominantly bully Emma throughout the book. But then, not to spoil too much, after one eyeopening conversation and Emma posting a video about her experiences, some of them immediately jump ship and become Emma and Alyssa's biggest supporters. It didn't really track for me and I wish that we could have seen at least a scene or two more of them wrestling with the homophobia that's been drilled into them from birth.

Now you may be wondering why, with all these gripes I seem to have, I still gave this book 3 stars. The simple answer is that it's fun, fast-paced and I enjoyed the experience of reading it for the most part. It's not spectacular by any means, but it was a fine way to spend a couple hours on an otherwise uninteresting afternoon. While there are dozens of other F/F contemporaries I would suggest over this, that doesn't mean that I wouldn't recommend picking it up if you have a few hours to kill.