Review: Look Both Ways by Alison Cherry
This is my final #readproud book for the month of June, and it was so much better than I thought it would be. Is anybody else old enough to remember the movie Kissing Jessica Stein? Don’t go looking it up or anything; you’ll be disappointed. It came out back in the early 2000s and was the first queer movie I saw in a movie theater. Imagine a half-empty room of angry Midwestern lesbians watching the protagonist decide she’s straight after all, and you’ll get the idea. So this book is, in many ways, like that movie. The title, and everything else about it, had me expecting a really disappointing depiction of bi-curiosity (ending, of course, in a dismissal of bisexuality). Imagine my delighted surprise, upon finding that this is a very sensitively written and mature exploration of sexual identity that fixes everything that was wrong with the worst lesbian date movie of 2001. It’s also, in my cynical opinion, a very realistic (if not positive) look at polyamory, if that’s a thing that interests you.
Eleven-year-old Riley believes in the whispers, magical fairies that will grant you wishes if you leave them tributes. Riley has a lot of wishes. He wishes bullies at school would stop picking on him. He wishes Dylan, his 8th grade crush, liked him, and Riley wishes he would stop wetting the bed. But most of all, Riley wishes for his mom to come back home. She…
The year is 1973. The Watergate hearings are in full swing. The Vietnam War is still raging. And homosexuality is still officially considered a mental illness. In the midst of these trying times is sixteen-year-old Jonathan Collins, a bullied, anxious, asthmatic kid, who aside from an alcoholic father and his sympathetic neighbor and friend Starla, is…
