Katherine Locke's Reviews > Under the Lights

Before I start raving, full disclosure that Dahlia Adler is one of my very good friends and knows some of my darkest secrets ;) That being said, it didn't affect my review at all and I assure you that both of us are relieved that I loved this book. For those who aren't going to read the whole review: buy this for every high school you know. Put this into the hands of every Gay-Straight Alliance in high schools and queer clubs in college. Know a girl struggling to come out, especially a queer girl of color? Here. Give her this book. You can't give her Bri, but you can give her Vanessa. And that will mean more than you may ever understand.

While I do not identify as lesbian, I am queer and the lack of queer girl literature in Young Adult has been something that's directly affected my life. I cannot tell you how differently my high school years would have been if I had had young adult books where girls were allowed to love girls. Like Vanessa, that this could be a reality, one that the world and the people around me accepted, didn't occur to me until I was out of high school. Before then, it seemed like something to hide, be ashamed of, and avoid because it wasn't okay, and it certainly wasn't safe.

And when I say I LOVED, I mean LOVE. LOVE. LOVE. Like, honestly, this book is everything I ever wanted from it and more than I could have hoped for. This is THE queer girl book Young Adult literature has been waiting for. This is the queer girl version of Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda and I don't make that comparison lightly. This book is going to save lives and help girls come out to their friends and family. And it does that without an agenda. There's no, "girls, this is going to go GREAT, everyone is going to LOVE that you're a lesbian!" message here. There's no message. Nothing's didactic here.

But that doesn't undermine the importance of it. If anything, it highlights how very much the queer Young Adult canon (or, even, the young adult canon without any qualifiers) needed Under the Lights. There needed to be a happy, flirty, romantic girl loves girl book that existed. The angst here is all normal teenage angst, the same angst you'd see between a heterosexual relationship in a book. Sure, Van has to figure out if and how she wants to come out and that's an important part of the book (and of life as a queer person in America. You are constantly coming out. You come out all the time to all sorts of people. I did at the beginning of this review, for instance.) But Van's relationship angst mirrors that of Ally and Liam in Behind the Scenes: who knows? Am I really doing this? Am I okay with this? How far are we going sexually and when? and that's where I wanted to hug and kiss (haha) Dahlia for writing it like that. That's crucial. There's external societal issues when you're queer, but inside the relationship, it's the same questions, same fears, same anxieties, same excitement.

Half of the book is written from Josh's perspective. He's another Hollywood actor and Van's friend (and temporary coworker at some point). While I see not everyone loved him or understood his point in the book, I love Josh Chester. He's so unbelievably unlikeable but he's the frat boy I'd actually like in college. The one who puts on a big show but really just wants to lay on a couch and watch trashy movies and maybe talk about his feelings eventually, when he realizes he's capable of holding more than one at the same time. I really liked his evolution, but also his evolving friendship with Van. That he becomes her first anchor during her relationship and decision of how/when/to whom to come out was really, really important. Even in his internal narration, when he first knows (before Van knows), he's casual and open about it.

That might not occur to Josh Chester as a big deal, but to the queer girl reading that? That means the world. Josh is the epitome of Hollywood male culture, right? He's a party animal, he sleeps with LOTS of different women, speaks disparagingly about them, floats in a sea of indecision...he's who we love to hate/love in the tabloids. We talk about his abs and his hair, fantasize about him, but we don't actually want to be NEAR him, right? Except--Josh helps Van in her time of need. We get the inside track to his mind. We understand her through him, and how he sees she's struggling and stressed when no one else does. He's humanized through her, and she's vulnerable (not in a damsel in distress way, though) through him. It's a stellar bit of writing, writer to writer.

This is the strongest book from Dahlia Adler yet and if you think I'm not going to just jump up and down on Twitter shouting about this forever, you are WRONG. Congrats, folks, this is all I'm talking about forever and always. <3