YA summer reads: Queer identities discovered, policed and celebrated

“The truth is, I’ve never quite been able to pin it down. The way queerness announces itself. And how it seems so intuitive for people.” When Imogen goes to visit her newly-out best friend at college, she is worried that she will be viewed as “a relic of Lili’s heteronormative small-town childhood” and be the awkward straight girl in a sea of queer pride.

That she worries about this reflects not just understandable adolescent self-absorption but the policing of identity in her peer group. Her friend Gretchen frequently lectures her over her “problematic” behaviour, such as remarking she “would kiss” Clea DuVall as Graham in the cult classic But I’m A Cheerleader. The reference to the film, an account of a clueless girl discovering her attraction to other girls, is one of many early hints that there’s more going on here for Imogen.

Imogen, Obviously (HarperCollins, £8.99) is the latest novel from Becky Albertalli, best known for Simon Vs the Homo sapiens Agenda (adapted into Love, Simon) and explicitly draws on her experience writing queer characters as a presumed straight woman. Albertalli came out as bisexual in 2020 in response to constant and cruel discussion of the topic online, noting: “This doesn’t feel good or empowering, or even particularly safe. Honestly, I’m doing this because I’ve been scrutinised, subtweeted, mocked, lectured and invalidated just about every single day for years and I’m exhausted.”

This experience is echoed in the book through an actress who comes out and is criticised for not doing it sooner, as well as through Imogen’s constant fretting over being “wrong” in some way. As “a known people pleaser”, she worries that her attraction to Lili’s friend Tessa – with whom there is much delightful flirting – is another manifestation of this. “Even if it’s not technically queerbaiting,” she thinks, “it’s definitely appropriation.”

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The default “take” on online communities is that they are a positive thing for minorities and underrepresented groups – spaces to find people who understand when those in “real life” may be hostile or clueless. There’s a dark and dangerous underbelly in many of those spaces, however, and Albertalli absolutely nails it here – the potential to obsess over labels, to assume bad faith in every instance, to punish even your closest friends for imagined or minor transgressions. That so much of this is done with the best of intentions, and in response to both real and perceived victimisation, is also noted; there are no outright villains here.

And – as readers might expect from an Albertalli novel – there may be “issues” but there’s also a gorgeous, swoony, giddy romantic story. You can skip over the social commentary and reflections on our increasingly-deranged culture and just appreciate it for the kissing, if you so choose. Her best book yet.

The importance of queer love stories for teenagers, in an era of book bans and challenges, is made pointedly clear in Simon James Green’s Boy Like Me (Scholastic, £8.99). Green, best known for writing very funny gay love stories, has had his own fraught experiences with a more familiar version of the morality police, the sort who would prefer there were no queer books at all. His latest novel takes place in 1994, when Section 28 prevented teachers in the UK from “promoting” homosexuality (in Ireland, this has typically been covered under the term “Catholic ethos”). In a small town in the middle of nowhere (“if you do die of boredom, please try not to cause a scene”), Jamie suspects his yearnings for boys go beyond friendship but can’t quite articulate it to himself.

A librarian breaking the rules to slip him a novel – Aidan Chambers’s excellent Dance On My Grave – in which two teenage boys fall in love serves as his awakening, especially as there are handwritten notes in the margins. There is someone “like him” in his very own school – and writing back leads to discovering a boy who “showed me that life could be so saturated with vibrant colour it could make you breathless”. It’s a particularly powerful experience given that his previous ideas of young gay men have been informed by the newspapers, where “they are despised, and dirty, and usually end up dead”. This is a more solemn work than Green’s usual fare but still ultimately uplifting and celebratory.

“You can’t help the way you were made,” seventeen-year-old Steven is told gently in David Fenne’s debut, Overemotional (Ink Road, £8.99). While the line resonates with Steven’s semi-closeted identity, it is overtly about the magical powers that he can’t control. His feelings get the better of him – literally. On the first page, he’s thrilled to be kissing a boy at a party – until the boy’s head explodes.

Fleeing to a remote town doesn’t keep his best friend from tracking him down and, soon, they’re uncovering a sinister conspiracy, complete with genre-savvy commentary about not going into basements or touching any “magical talismans, ancient sarcophagi or tubes of alien goo”. This is both zany and heart-warming, with further books on the way.

Freja Nicole Woolf’s Never Trust A Gemini (Walker, £7.99) is also the first of a new series, focusing on horoscope-obsessed, love-obsessed Cat (“Scorpio Season is all about passion and I am very passionate about not dying alone,” the fourteen-year-old notes). Her crush on the beautiful Alison leads to her wandering out in front of a bus, while mysterious Morgan is not the kind of cool Cat’s clique approve of. The dramas and embarrassments of daily life are captured perfectly on the page, with Cat as a lovable-disaster of a heroine.

First crushes – “a tickling and fluttering inside me ... like a happy anxiety” – also feature in Oskar Kroon’s Rhubarb Lemonade (Hot Key, £7.99), translated from the original Swedish by A A Prine. Vinga’s summer with her grandfather on a small island is one of sailing and stories, of rhubarb lemonade and quiet reflection. The arrival of the often-moody Ruth changes things, echoing other shifts in Vinga’s life, including her parents’ divorce. A quiet, poetic coming-of-age story.

There’s more summer romance in singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko’s Girls Like Girls (Penguin, £8.99), based on her single of the same name, though the novel adds more complications and grit to the burgeoning relationship between queen bee Sonya and new girl Coley, with Sonya achingly confused about her feelings and Coley still grieving the loss of her mother and adjusting to life with the father who abandoned her years ago. This quick but emotional read takes us back to those ancient times of LiveJournal and flip phones (2006), while evoking the timeless, always-fraught psychological landscape of intense teenage friendships.

Finally, YouTuber Calum McSwiggan writes about a boy who just wants to be “normal”, as he sees it – straight, in other words. Straight Expectations (Penguin, £8.99) sees Max’s dream come true, with less-than-ideal results. In this new reality, his best mate is nowhere to be found and a platonic friend is now his girlfriend – as well as having given up on her artistic dreams. This fun and charming “be careful what you wish for” story is a perfect summer read, escapist but gently thought-provoking.