I’ve read a few Robin Talley books over the past few years and this was by far my favourite. This novel follows two perspective the first takes places in the present day and follows Abbey Zimet a high school senior who for her senior project has decided to focus on lesbian pulp fiction. Throughout her research she becomes drawn to one novel in particular and so she decides to try and track down the original author. The second follows Janet Jones in the 1950s who always felt alone until she comes across a lesbian pulp fiction book at a bus stop and comes to the realisation that she isn’t alone and that there are other girls out there just like her. She also takes it upon herself to write her own Pulp fiction novel. While I loved both of these characters I felt more invested in Janet’s story even though it was much more heart breaking. As a bisexual woman I feel so lucky to have grown up in this era and can not imagine what it must have been like for members of the LGBTQ+ community in that time and while we still have a long way to go I think we should be proud of what we have achieved. It also showed my just how much I don’t know about the history of my own community and it’s something that I definitely need to put more time in to learning. Overall, I adored this book and it’s one that will definitely stick with me. I gave this 5 out of 5 stars.

I picked this book up because I liked the cover and the premise sounded pretty interesting – two stories set sixty years apart, about lesbian teens growing up in DC. I try to read as much queer lit as possible, but it’s not always easy to find, particularly the f/f side of things. The two characters are Abby, our modern teen, who is wrestling with a breakup, her parents’ disintegrating marriage, and the pressures of college applications. She finds solace in a creative writing project researching lesbian pulp novels in the 50s. One particular book, Women of the Twilight Realm, catches her attention, and she’s consumed by her obsession with finding out more about the book’s author, Marian Love. In the fifties, Janet Jones is only just beginning to figure out that a) she likes girls, and b) so do plenty of other women. Her best friend Marie has just got a job as a typist in the state department, though, and there are rumours of the abrupt interrogations and dismissals of anyone even vaguely suspected of being gay. When Janet discovers the pulp lesbian books, she adores them as proof that she’s not alone. Both Abby and Janet were really great characters. I liked how some of their struggles as young lesbian women were the same, but of course they were also entirely different. Abby is out and proud at school and to her friends and family – her friend group is made of a diverse range of gender identities and sexualities – and she regularly goes to protests and doesn’t hesitate to suggest writing lesbian pulp fiction for a school project. Janet, on the other hand, is constantly terrified, elated to find the woman she loves returns her feelings, yet petrified of what might happen to both of them if they’re discovered. I found the fifties sections much harder to read than the modern stuff – I think out of all the historical periods I read about, the fifties is probably the one I find scariest. It’s a decade we laud for its aesthetic, but when you actually look into things, it’s full of looming threats – the Cold War, Jim Crow, and the Lavender Scare all come into play to some degree or another in this book. But it seems well-researched as well as being very well-written. Abby’s problems were much easier to confront, because they’re the sort of things that are very common for modern teenagers. She broke up with her girlfriend Linh before Linh visited her family in Vietnam last summer and thought they’d get back together when Linh returned. But they haven’t, and Abby can’t figure out how she feels or what’s going on. Her home life is also a mess, with her little brother acting out and her parents constantly avoiding each other and arguing when they’re together. She’s starting to fall behind in her classes and only reading Women of the Twilight Realm helps her to escape from it all. I really liked Abby – she felt like a very realistic teenager. Anyway, I really loved the book – it was a bit longer than I might’ve liked but it’s essentially telling two separate stories, so I can understand the need for an extra hundred pages. It was just a lovely, refreshing read for me, and I’m so glad there are authors like Robin Talley out there.

In 1955, student and budding writer Janet Jones is in love with her best friend Marie but they must keep their love a secret, for they live in the age of McCarthyism where any subversive behaviour could have them just disappear. When, by chance, Janet discovers a book at a bus station she has an awakening, there are books out there about women who go about with other women in the way that men go about with women. She's compelled to write her own lesbiana story but she must also keep that a secret or deal with the consequences of being queer in the 1950s. In 2017, Abby is having a hard time. She's not long broken up with her girlfriend-now-best-friend Linh, she's falling behind in school and now her parents are on the brink of divorce. When pushed to come up with an idea for one of her final school projects she stumbles across 1950s lesbian pulp novels and quickly becomes obsessed. She's finding herself drawn to a particular author, Marian Love and wants nothing more than to track her down. But tracking down an author who only wrote one book under a pseudonym isn't going to be easy and Abby may not be ready for what she finds. This one was a difficult one for me to rate, I wanted to love it but I really couldn't. There are lots of positives to my reading experience (which I'll discuss next) but there were a lot of issues with it. I really enjoyed the experience of the dual narrative which was so well done, the two stories expertly intertwined. Aspects of the past would inform us of Abby's experiences in the future and vice versa with Janet in the past. As a British person with basic historical knowledge I knew very little about how tough it actually was for people of the LGBT+ community in 1950s America. I was introduced to Joseph McCarthy and his crusade to rid the USA of communists or those who engaged in subversive behaviour and then further introduced to the "Lavender Scare" - the witch hunt to take jobs away from queer people. This is the first book I've read that addresses this dark period of history and though I'm not an American it's really interesting to see how far society has come and how difficult my life could have been if I had been born then and there. There was also great queer rep contained within which I'd expect from a Robin Talley novel. There's Jewish lesbians, black lesbians, biracial bisexuals, some people just questioning and then characters who don't want a label (but want people to know that they definitely aren't straight). It was also great to see something so focused on multiple queer women as I feel like the trend is usually to write about more male characters - I've definitely been able to easily find a more male LGBT+ centred literature. Now to the parts I didn't like as much. My biggest problem - the story. I just really didn't care about it at all. I understood the struggle of the times but after the first hundred or so pages I felt that the next 300 were just filler. The pace slowed down, the complaints became repetitive and the story progressed very little. I also really didn't like Abby, I just couldn't get on with her! She spent the whole book miserable and feeling sorry for herself. There's teen angst and then there's TEEN ANGST - similar to Bella in Twilight, Abby was just really unlikable. Janet was a much more sufferable character but even she bored me a bit. I also found some of the reasons provided for why things happened in the book to be really unbelievable and for contemporary/historical/ real life story I didn't want to have to extend my belief too far like I would in a fantasy novel. Ten out of ten for the history lesson, four out of ten for the story. But at least I have the urge to go out and read some 1950s lesbian erotica.