Age: High School

A great contribution to the GLBTQ literary genre in YA for it's unique subject matter, including Laura being in a long-term lesbian relationship without familiarity --and sometimes rejection--of the queer scene and her lesbian identity. Furthermore, the character is Cuban-American and the complexity of coming out as a Catholic. However, the superfluous writing style went beyond stylistic flavor and into downright boring. While I cared about the characters enough to want to know the ending, I felt annoyed where the writer chose to place her time and her strained use of character development.

"But it took a long time, story-wise, to get to this point. Each chapter seemed to have at least one scene with a meandering conversation that summarized things we already knew -- e.g., Laura updating her best pal Soli on the goings-on at her job or her not-relationship with Francisco -- or a meandering conversation about things that didn't have much relation to the story at hand -- e.g., Soli, Laura, and Tazer talking about their quinces. Plus, most chapters started with several paragraphs (or pages) of summary about the things that had gone on between the end of the last chapter and the beginning of the new one. This resulted in a conversational, almost bloggy style of storytelling, which perhaps works for some readers, but it also meant that a lot of events were happening offstage. For instance, the reader is told about Laura's relationship with Francisco, but he rarely pops up as a character with an active role in a scene, and by the time a climactic scene does happen between the pair, it's hard to muster the appropriate emotion when the story itself hasn't spent much time helping the reader get invested in the conflict. Better developed were the relationships and conflicts between Laura and her surrogate family, and Laura and her mom" (Lauren's review at http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/158565205).