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F/F Friday: Annie on My Mind
Oct. 12th, 2018 08:29 pmNancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind, published in 1982, is one of the earliest YA novels to have a sympathetic portrayal of a lesbian romance, which ( spoilers )
I liked it. I didn’t love it: it does that thing I find annoying in romance novels (well, any novel really) where the book tells you that the characters had an interesting conversation - there’s one instance here where Liza says something like “and then Annie and I talked about mortality for a while” - but we don’t get the conversation.
I realize that not everyone wants a good rousing discussion of the inevitability of death getting in the way of their romance, but I super do. I mean, it doesn’t have to be mortality, but if I’m going to get invested in characters then I need to see them talking about something, you know?
But it is extremely sweet. I enjoyed the fun that Liza and Annie have playing goofy imaginative games together, like just after they meet when they pretend to be knights and have a duel in the medieval hall of a museum.
There’s also what amounts to a lesbian reading list in here, which must have been incredibly useful for gay teens in the pre-internet days when it would have been harder to look that up.
I liked it. I didn’t love it: it does that thing I find annoying in romance novels (well, any novel really) where the book tells you that the characters had an interesting conversation - there’s one instance here where Liza says something like “and then Annie and I talked about mortality for a while” - but we don’t get the conversation.
I realize that not everyone wants a good rousing discussion of the inevitability of death getting in the way of their romance, but I super do. I mean, it doesn’t have to be mortality, but if I’m going to get invested in characters then I need to see them talking about something, you know?
But it is extremely sweet. I enjoyed the fun that Liza and Annie have playing goofy imaginative games together, like just after they meet when they pretend to be knights and have a duel in the medieval hall of a museum.
There’s also what amounts to a lesbian reading list in here, which must have been incredibly useful for gay teens in the pre-internet days when it would have been harder to look that up.
