The simplistic third-person figural narrative allows us to see into Lily’s mind, which questions the experience of falling in love. We watch a friendship - rooted in teenage angst - blossom into something more romantic. We see the trope of the complicated first kiss. In many ways, Lily’s story evokes the joys of YA romance novels. Where it really stands out, though, is in its balance of both historical realism and hope, a balance we so rarely see in queer stories. For one, the beautiful and complex writing dares to compete with the prose of some of the best-selling novels published for adult readers. The novel succeeds in many places where I feel that most YA books fail. Set in San Francisco in the 1950s, the novel tells the story of 17-year-old Lily Hu, a Chinese American who begins to question her sexuality after developing a relationship with Kath, a white girl in her class. That changed this month when I picked up Malinda Lo’s novel “Last Night at the Telegraph Club,” which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2021. Since then, I’ve tried to reignite my excitement surrounding the genre that inspired me to fall in love with reading, but I haven’t been able to do so since middle school. Throughout seventh and eighth grade, I consumed YA novels as if my life depended on it - at least two a week at my peak. It’s been a while since I exited my young adult literature phase.
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