We learn about the collection of secret photos of women that Lily keeps in her room. We see Lily’s first indications of her queer identity and her resulting confusion. The readers - particularly the young readers - of “Last Night at the Telegraph Club” can see their experiences projected onto the page. Lily’s narrative reads almost like a how-to book on putting words to queer feelings. I can only imagine the impact this novel would have had on middle school me, and the impact it certainly has on young people today. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Lily as a character and getting to learn more about queer history, but I came into the novel knowing I identify as queer. What made me happiest when reading this book was imagining its target audience. Yet still, Lily is someone to which contemporary readers can relate. She discusses the dangers of being both queer and Chinese at a time when homosexuality was still considered a psychological disorder, when sex between members of the same sex was still illegal, when McCarthyism and the Red Scare were tied closely to anti-Asian sentiments and deportations. So, Lo created a novel that readers can look towards as a pseudo-historical document, a vignette of an erased community. “It has been difficult for me to find evidence of lesbians of color in this time period Finding any history of queer Asian American women has been even more difficult,” she writes. Lo includes much of this research at the end of the novel in the author’s notes. The novel is based on copious amounts of research, both on queer life in the 50s and on life for Chinese Americans living in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the same era, a time plagued by a rampant fear of communism. It provides readers the opportunity to learn about what this period may have been like for a marginalized group. The novel contextualizes this love for us. It ends with Lily feeling “a queer giddiness overtaking her, as if her body might float up from the ground because she was so buoyant with this lightness, this love.” Lily and Kath’s love story ends with hope, with a possibility for a future, if not a guarantee. Rather than flowery fiction, we see a snapshot of what life could have been like for a real-life Lily. I didn’t end the novel with tears of joy stinging my eyes, as I tend to after reading other more-celebratory queer romances.īut I was still satisfied. Admittedly, I was upset when that didn’t happen. I hoped that Lily and Kath would run off together, move into their own small one-bedroom in the city and spend all their nights at the Telegraph Club (the fictional lesbian bar that brings the girls together) with their new network of queer friends. However, Lily’s placement in society and Lo’s insistence on realism makes the possibility for a happy ending something one could only hope for rather than expect. 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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