Sophomore activist Jesse is in love with preppy junior Emily, who she meets on Tuesdays for secret make out sessions because Emily is closeted and has a boyfriend. But their secret world collides with their public ones when they find themselves on opposite sides when a Walmart-esque corporation sponsors school activities to curry favor in the town they want to build their next superstore in.
The Long Version:
Kind of a messy story: it wanted to be three or so stories at once and never seemed to fulfill on any of them. For some inexplicable reason the main character's chapters were in the third person while the other two supporting characters chapters were in the first person. The story meandered a lot and what I gathered was the main plot didn't get started until halfway into it.
Kind of messy characters: they were cute and potentially endearing, but you could tell they were supposed to be over the top in an entertaining way, lots of old hippie protester types, the gay best friend who's into Ayn Rand, the prissy Tracy Flick overachiever, but they weren't over the top enough or developed enough. The main character was slightly more endearing, but also lacking in the development department.
Kind of a messy tone: Because the girls were on the younger side of high school, and given how the story started I expected a lighter tone, something that would be great for a younger lesbian or curious reader, which would have been great considering how few Lesbian YA books there are out there for the younger side of readers. But then there came the flip joke about roofies early on and a few other things that seemed out of place tonally with the tonal direction this story was taking me.
I'd still recommend this book for a younger high school reader, given the dearth of books that approach lesbian topics without being explicit, but I'm not sure how jazzed my booktalk would be.
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