Lissa has a lot on her plate: taking care of her little sister, going to school, working on the weekends, and now there's all this drama ever since she and her best friend Kate kissed each other at a party. Life's complicated for a teenager.

Lauren Myracle's debut novel tells a story so tangled it has to be about high school. The characters are raw and fluid, developed enough to make sense, but not so much as to be predictable. Myracle casts Atlanta as the perfect backdrop for this story of coming of age and coming out. It's a total immersion experience-- the setting, characters, feelings, and events are too vivid to be anything but realistic. ( )

The Little Bookworm

One night at a party, Lissa's best friend leans in for a kiss and Lissa kisses her back. Now Kate is ignoring Lissa and pretending nothing happened while Lissa is angry and confused. The two friends use to mean everything to each other and one kiss is getting in the way. But Lissa knows it must mean something. As she experiments with lucid dreaming, Lissa tries to come to terms with what kissing Kate means.

I've only read a couple of things by Lauren Myracle, but I've enjoyed them and when I set about looking for books for the GLBT Challenge, I found this book so it seemed a good match for me. And it was! I really enjoyed this book. No matter if you are gay or not, Lissa's struggle with liking someone who doesn't like you (or won't admit it) is easily relatable. She struggles with the aftermath of kissing her best friend and does not try to write it off. Kate was also interesting. There is a lot of foreshadowing of the kiss, mainly lead by Kate, and even if she doesn't admit it, I think I know what road Kate is going to go down. ( )

Richie's Picks: KISSING KATE by Lauren Myracle, Dutton, April 2003

A girl attends an end-of-summer party with her best friend, gets drunk, and
has something so horrible happen to her that she cannot tell anyone about it.
Her best friend along with her other so-called friends shun her, rather than
trying to find out what awful thing had made her call the cops. With the
support and nurture of a teacher she can trust, and after a school year from
hell, she finally is able to speak.

Today, I will be finishing up this year's reading of Laurie Halse Anderson's
beloved novel, SPEAK, to our three eighth-grade English classes. They'll
hear the climax--Andy Beast invading the janitor's closet, and Melinda coming
to terms with what happened that night. Then, sadly, my pleasure of sharing
Melinda's story will be over until next year.

"I lift myself off the floor--easily, like a puff of air.
I float out of my bedroom and into the hall, past Beth's cracked-open door
and down the staircase. I can see every grain of wood on the handrail, every
fleck of paint on the walls. I propel myself toward the wide kitchen window
above the sink, but I bump against the pane and bounce back. I back up and
try again, focusing my concentration, and this time I push through--Zip--like
pushing through steam.
In front of the house, I see a girl walking down the street. My spine
tingles, because it's late. She shouldn't be out by herself.
'Hey,' I say, but the girl doesn't look up. 'Excuse me,' I say louder.
I float closer and I see the girl's face: it's Kate. She doesn't notice that
I'm hovering in front of her. She doesn't hear me when I call her name.
'Kate!' I cry. I wave my hand in front of her face.
I don't like this. I want to wake up..."

KISSING KATE also involves a girl going to an end-of-summer party with her
best friend, getting drunk, and having something happen that she won't tell
anyone about...and causes her best friend to shun her. After four years of
doing everything together and knowing each other's deepest secrets, it's all
changed:

"I squeezed my eyes shut and wished I could take it all back, everything that
happened, so that Kate and I could return to being friends like we used to
be. I felt wrong inside without her, weepy and miserable and pathetic. And
that was the part I didn't get, because didn't she feel that same way, too?

"We'd been best friends since we were twelve, long enough that our names were
paired in everyone's mind: Kate and Lissa. Always her name first, not that I
cared."

What happened that night at the party?

A kiss. Instigated by Kate. A kiss that for a brief moment has Lissa
reaching for the stars, until Kate, clearly unhinged by the situation, runs
to the nearest boy and leaves Lissa utterly alone.

"At school, Kate and I danced around each other like two like-charged
magnets: close enough to keep tabs on each other, but with an invisible force
preventing us from fully connecting."

KISSING KATE, Lauren Myracle's first novel, is the story of what happens to
Lissa after that kiss. In the mix we find a little sister approaching
adolescence, a delivery job working for the only close female adult in
Lissa's life, a coworker who thinks herself an alien, and insights from a
book on lucid dreaming.

In contrast to Melinda Sordino, who totally shuts down in her doomed attempt
to make what happened just go away, Lissa faces the conundrum (a three-point
vocab word from SPEAK) that while she's NOT trying to make it go away, the
only person with whom she'd be open to discussing the situation is the same
person who made it happen and who now won't speak honestly to her. It sure
doesn't take being gay or lesbian (or contemplating the possibility) to
empathize with the tension and confusion that Lissa faces, trying to come to
terms with who she is when suddenly she no longer has that best friend for
support.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy at aol.com ( )

I really enjoyed reading Kissing Kate. The book is a look into the lives of two best friends whose friendship ends when the two girls share a kiss. Lissa discovers that she has always been in love Kate, while Kate precedes to pretend Lissa does not exist. This causes more problems than meets the eye because everyone at school knows them as "Kate & Lissa" and Lissa doesn't believe she has the charisma or the confidence to survive in high school on her own.

It is true that there could more character development, but most young adult novels are meant to be light, quick reads. I kind of like the way Lauren Myracle presents her characters because in high school everything seems like the end of the world at that moment, but when you look back on it you realize it wasn't. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgendered) or for anyone who knows someone who is. Kissing Kate helps the reader to understand how difficult coming out can be for yourself and those around you. ( )

Lissa kisses Kate in a drunken moment; Kate ignores Lissa. Kate questions her sexual orientation. A bit pat but therapeutic for questioning teens. Nothing sexually explicit. Empress of the World is a more fully developed look at a simular issue ( )