aimiller's Reviews (689)

This book fucked me the fuck up- in a good way, I think.

I don't know if this counts as a spoiler, but I went into it thinking perhaps it was going to be your typical gay YA book, maybe a little more nuanced in dealing with class and race, but ultimately similar. Holy shit was I wrong, in the best way possible. It toes so many lines but stays balanced- it's not a gay romance, but it's not a gay tragedy either. The twists are intense but I wasn't left feeling like they were just for shock value- everything made sense, and had its place.

This book is not easy to read, though. As a white queer person, I really struggled with aspects of the plot--not in a bad way, but in the ache of living in a homophobic culture. That wasn't what I was looking for in reading this book, nor did any recommendation I read prepare me for it in any real way. I kept saying in the middle of this book that I didn't want any gay/queer person to read it, because it's so brutal in portraying these parts of our lives. I'll amend that to say gay/queer people should read it, but should also take time for self care as they read it.

[trigger warning that is also a spoiler]

I do want to say, for those who need to know, this book contains a few sequences of gay-bashing, including one involving a parent. There are also depictions of suicide and domestic abuse.]

Typical Larson fare; lots of details and he does a decent job of weaving together his narrative threads, though it seems to have escaped him a little bit in the last few chapters--the choice to shift the focus so heavily onto the US's entrance into WWI seemed to me to be a bit unnecessary, or at least just disjointed from the rest of the book. I would have been more interested in a focused look at the court cases that followed, rather than the entrance into the war, but clearly he felt that was a more necessary thread to pick up.

I should note that Larson and I have fundamental differences in the way we approach history, and that many people enjoy his books. I appreciate his attempts to cite things, though I find his self-citation to be kind of laughable, given the other kinds of work he produces. There are just key differences in how I see historical practice and how he sees it that makes reading his work very difficult for me personally.

So fun! The art is great and all the characters really pop off the page. I'm looking forward to more of this!

It's never been quite so clear to me as it was reading this book that there is a major difference between straight authors trying to capture LGBT/queer voices and LGBT/queer authors writing those characters. There is so much depth and richness to all of the characters, and while people unfamiliar with YA may be like "they're so dramatic," I am not so far removed from that age that I have forgotten just how dramatic teenagers realistically are.

It was such a heartfelt, heartwrenching book. The number of chapter-ending cliffhangers and the characters' arcs had me going on a number of face-journeys, which is always a sign of a good book!

The Pride sequence at the end made me bawl, and also now I want to shove it in the face of every LGBT/queer person while simultaneously never let a straight person see it, which I think means it's important to me now.

I enjoyed this a lot- some of it isn't very new, stuff that has been reiterated in interviews before the book was published, but it's frankly worth it just for the pictures. It's a pretty beautiful book, and definitely does what it sets out to do (ie be a coffee table book for musicals!) I will say I am sad that there is no bibliography included, but I'm very biased and have specific needs that I recognize not everyone else shares.

I am a little concerned about the longevity of the book- my copy creaks every time I open it, and the inside binding just sort of cracks. I feel like I need a book pillow just to read it! I know there's an ~aesthetic~ going on (hence the deckled pages) but I hope the book is still structurally sound!

Once again, we're held back by Goodreads's inability to give half-star reviews. (My real rating would be like 3.5 or 3.75.)

I wanted so desperately to love this book, and I did really enjoy swaths of it. I'm more than willing to admit that me not loving it 100% is on me, not the book itself--it does a good job with what it's supposed to do. My favorite parts are where she reflects more on what the history says about the ~American spirit~; I'm already secretly constructing a syllabus for American studies in my head that involves reading this book, so that I suppose is very high praise.

I think one thing that I struggled with is how inundated I've been recently with books about the Revolutionary Era. Again, this is not Sarah Vowell's fault--I can only hope that her sales have been boosted because of the recent Hamilton musical. The informational parts were nothing ground-breaking, not that I think they should be, but coming off of just having pretty recently finished the Chernow Hamilton biography and all of its details about battles and what the Gay Trio were doing in them, I wasn't as interested as I might otherwise have been.

I was very grateful to see a bibliography in the back (because I'm a huge nerd), and I want to go back to her other books now to see if they also have bibliographies.

Overall I'd say it's a solid book, just not my cup of tea at this exact moment in my life!

So fun, catches you in right away, and just overall a pretty rad read!