Submitted by Sarah

When I first bought this book, sometime in middle school, I honestly thought it was about drugs. The back blurb on my particular edition said something like, “Even straight kids will enjoy this love story” – I thought it meant “straight” as in straight-edge.  At the time, I was a studious nerd who hung out in the school library; in this book, I was looking for a little excitement and maybe a chance to moralize over bad behavior.

Instead, I got Liza Winthrop, student body president and classic over-achiever.  Her dreams are to save her private school from closing down, and to study architecture at MIT.  However, when she meets Annie Kenyon ( while Annie was singing to the knights at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), she realizes that there’s more to life than following in her parent’s footsteps.  It’s a typical “Girl meets Girl, Girls fall in love, Girls get caught doin’ it” love story.  In the end, Liza and Annie’s relationship is an outward expression of their struggles to establish an identity within their family frameworks, while also dealing with a growing awareness of their sexualities.

As a shy girl with few friends, the idea that every person has a soul mate, the way Liza and Annie were soul mates, was deeply moving to me.  Not one other character in the novel understood them, especially after they were forcibly outed.  Although I am not gay, I could empathize with their feelings of alienation, and I drew strength from the fact that each girl ultimately followed her dream, despite the forces keeping them home and keeping them apart.

Since I identified so strongly with both Liza and Annie, it’s hard for me to understand why anyone would feel this book was inappropriate for students; although it does contain some adult themes, it almost perfectly captures the teenage struggle for self-identity and self-expression.  There are no explicit scenes, but I suppose some parents object to the fact that it’s generally accepting of homosexuality.