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Book Review: grl2grl, by Julie Anne Peters

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grl2grl is a collection of short stories about LGBT characters, mostly girls, hence the title, grl2grl. There are ten stories in the collection, and each is very different from the next, dealing with a range of issues, from coming out to being dumped, abuse to abstinence-only education. I often describe short stories as being either complete stories or snapshots from a character’s life, and there are both kinds here. Julie Anne Peters tries to give each character a distinct personality, and I think that she succeeded, although the narrative styles are quite similar in some of the stories.

My favourites were ‘Can’t Stop The Feeling’, which is about a girl who is trying to pluck up the courage to go to a meeting of the Gay/Straight Alliance group at her school, ‘TIAD’, about a girl who has just been dumped and goes online to a chatroom for advice and companionship, a story I really liked as I thought it was quite original – and ‘Two-Part Invention’, about a violinist who’s in love with the cellist she plays with at summer music camp. I just love musician stories.

I don’t think that every story should have had a dramatic impact – the presence of happy endings and sad endings and ambiguous endings makes the collection more interesting – but some of the stories I liked less were a bit too much like a tiny snippet from a life, with nothing really happening in them. Overall, however, the insight into the minds of the characters was compelling and sometimes really affecting.

It’s a very American book, a lot of the things referred to don’t really exist this side of the pond – I have only heard of a couple of schools with Gay/Straight Alliance groups here, and there are only a couple of summer camp organisations. But if you’ve watched American teen movies then this shouldn’t cause much of a problem.

I think that in a perfect world, every library would have a copy of grl2grl. I think it’s one of those books with the power to make troubled teenagers feel as if they’re not alone, and as the stories are indeed short, it would be great for reluctant readers. My only complaint would be that it’s such a skinny little volume, and it left me wanting to read more from the author. But that’s fine, as she’s already written novels!

Hey! Look!

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Should you deign to, you can get yourself a copy of a book that includes a short story of mine! When Amazon get it back in stock, anyway. This book is an anthology of work by writers that graduated from my MA programme at Goldsmiths between, I think, 2006 and 2009, selected by some of the staff. I would list the contributors, but there are forty.

My story is 2,846 words long and is about a girl with a strange name (‘The Secrets of Millennia Nolan’), no real friends, a fair-sized secret, and a longing for a decent summer. Everybody else has quite dull names, as names go. I guess I was running low on name-fuel that day (I have since bought another baby naming book. The first one really freaked my mum out when she saw it. The conversation went something like this: ‘Li, I’m not sure I want to ask this, but why is there a copy of Baby Names For Dummies in the boxroom?’ ‘Because I’m a writer. I have to name characters.’ ‘Oh. Riiiiight.’). It is set at a party. There are only two references to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the story, which shows remarkable restraint on my part. Nobody dies. There is vodka.

My sister said it was really good, if that encourages you, though I’m quite sure that precisely nobody reading this will buy the book. Then, years later, obsessed fans of mine will be trawling through the blog archives, and they’ll read this and kick themselves. ‘Where was I in 2011,’ they’ll say, ‘before that tiny print run ran out?’

And they’ll pay £££££s for a copy on eBay. Two months later, I’ll announce a collection of short stories about girls with strange names, which will include a reprint of ‘The Secrets of Millennia Nolan’, and they’ll kick themselves. HAHA! Don’t worry, it’s an investment for your (great?)grandchildren, when in the centuries to come my work is rediscovered and all relevant paraphernalia becomes worth gazillions of creds.

I have read too many sci-fi books in which the currency is ‘creds’. Why isn’t it Earthos, like Euros? Possibly because ‘Earthos’ sounds stupid, and kind of like a breakfast cereal. I think the universal currency should be called the yen, like the current Japanese currency, because then, in English, ‘I have a yen for that’ would take on a whole new double meaning! Just me?