Review: The Queer Girl is Going to Be Okay

 


First off, I absolutely love both the cover and the title of this book. The art is just SO GORGEOUS. Unfortunately, those were probably the most compelling elements of the book to me. The story follows three best friends in Houston and their various senior year challenges, with the sort of core being Dawn’s entry to a film competition, after which the book is named. Each of the three girls has a very distinct story, connected to the others only by virtue of their friendship, and unfortunately I think this made the pacing kind of weird. When one character was having a crucial story moment, it felt like the other storylines were just kind of dragging along for the sake of being there. 

One thing I did really appreciate was how this book handled representation. It switched the stereotypical roles that the best friends would have played based on their race – the Black character was the one with strict parents who fixated on her grades, and the Asian character was the one with a fun single mom and bad grades. As for Dawn, I absolutely loved the way the book set up her being trans. For a lot of the book I was wondering why on earth this straight girl was so obsessed with queer love, and then it turned out that she was in fact queer. I really appreciate this because it does a good job of undermining certain people’s (myself maybe included) tendency to gatekeep queerness and accuse anyone who isn’t obviously queer of fetishization. Because while I do think it’s an issue, it’s not something you can call out an individual for because you never know what their experience has been and where they’re coming from. So from that perspective, the book did a really excellent job. I just don’t think it’s enough to make up for a plodding plot and writing that didn’t really grab me.


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