This example particularly demonstrates my point because of the use of the em dashes — just to really make sure you didn’t miss that info! It feels like the queerness on display (both in the leads and the minor characters) is very uniform. and I felt like we never rlly got much of a resolution with her family, esp her little sister, Emma. As with the other two books in this series, Ashley Herring Blake successfully mixes witty repartee and emotional journeys. She is the author of the young adult novels Suffer Love, How to Make a Wish, and Girl Made of Stars (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the middle grade novels Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World, The Mighty Heart of Sunny St.

The book also uses outdated terms like "latinx" that have been widely panned by the hispanic community as a whole.

Ah yes, so, it turns out that “throwing every single queer stereotype at the wall and seeing what sticks” worked for me for precisely one book.

Also, her "friends" are so unsympathetic I kind of don't want the "save the theater" plotline to succeed. In what world was it easier to lie and say "yea we are" instead of being like "it was one hookup, it's too early to tell yet"? Okay, so my memory sucks and I remember enjoying the first two Bright Falls books a lot but did I laugh as much as with this one? I don’t want to leave Bright Falls, and Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date certainly lives up to the first two novels in the series. I’m all for more diversity in books but not when it comes across as tokenizing marginalized communities and not when it’s incorporated so unnaturally.Jennifer Crusie blogged about it a bit back (or, if that link doesn't work, here's a cache of the original) and it changed how I understand story. Her entire family is all paired off and her parents have been together and are still extremely in love. The diversity felt like pandering, the side characters felt like cardboard cutouts, and the plot points were constructed entirely out of cliches. I’ve consumed a lot of sapphic fiction these past few months by many different authors and the resolution in this book to the obligatory 3rd act breakup is by far the most satisfactory out of all the stories I’ve read to date. I love a bit of Shakespeare interjected into my fiction (and have seen quite a few genderswapped Shakespeare productions and they just slap) so it just intrigues me so much and I wish I could see Stevie on the stage.