Annie on My Mind

At its heart, this is just a love story. A simple, heartfelt, emotional love story of a couple that faces hurdles and tries to overcome them.

How is the book different from the umpteen other romance novels in the market?

Well, the couple in love – Liza and Annie – happen to be young and female. Also, ‘Annie on my Mind’ happens to be one of the first queer fiction books where the gay characters were main characters, both survive till the end and stay homosexual till the end!

Seventeen year old Liza and Annie meet, they become friends, and then realise that their feelings go much deeper. Despite pressure from school and family, they know their relationship is meant to be.

Both Liza and Annie are high schoolers, and their voices are show more written so authentically that you’ll forget the author was in her forties when she wrote this. Every single one of their feelings comes out strongly, right from confusion over sexual orientation to falling in love to anger over others’ reactions. They have fun with each other, they fight with each other, they worry about each other – it’s a genuine portrayal of a young relationship. With the benefit of hindsight of being a reader in 2022, you can't help but wonder at what will happen to these two beautiful souls. To see them journey through the paths of prejudice and trying their best to overcome the hurdles stacked against them is a moving experience.

This was first published in 1982, so some of the content is obviously going to feel dated and predictable today. What is surprising is how much of the content still feels contemporary even forty years down the line. The message it puts across is still highly relevant. It shatters all stereotypes that conservatives might have about homosexuality, lesbians in particular.

If only modern YA authors take a cue from this book! This is how YA romance should be written. Not sparks or thunder at first sight. Not gushing loins or heaving bosoms. A true soul-to-soul connection that delivers on romance without going into elaborate physical details.

My copy of the book (published in 2007, on the 25th anniversary of the book) includes an interview with the author, and this turned out to be the perfect addition to the book. The author spoke of her own experience growing up and coming out as a lesbian in 1950s USA. It’s no wonder she was able to portray Liza’s and Annie’s struggles so effectively in the book.

You want a further reason to read it? The book has been banned from many school libraries and publicly burned in Kansas City. What better way to challenge the status quo than to make a grab at a banned novel!

The book is iconic for a reason. If you want a beautiful teen love story where the romance is appealing and the struggles are real, do try.

4.25 stars from me.

One favourite quote:
“Don't punish yourselves for people's ignorant reactions to what we all are. Don't let ignorance win. Let love.”

***********************
Join me on the Facebook group, Readers Forever!, for more reviews, book-related discussions and fun. show less

At its heart, this is just a love story. A simple, heartfelt, emotional love story of a couple that faces hurdles and tries to overcome them.

How is the book different from the umpteen other romance novels in the market?

Well, the couple in love – Liza and Annie – happen to be young and female. Also, ‘Annie on my Mind’ happens to be one of the first queer fiction books where the gay characters were main characters, both survive till the end and stay homosexual till the end!

Seventeen year old Liza and Annie meet, they become friends, and then realise that their feelings go much deeper. Despite pressure from school and family, they know their relationship is meant to be.

Both Liza and Annie are high schoolers, and their voices are show more written so authentically that you’ll forget the author was in her forties when she wrote this. Every single one of their feelings comes out strongly, right from confusion over sexual orientation to falling in love to anger over others’ reactions. They have fun with each other, they fight with each other, they worry about each other – it’s a genuine portrayal of a young relationship. With the benefit of hindsight of being a reader in 2022, you can't help but wonder at what will happen to these two beautiful souls. To see them journey through the paths of prejudice and trying their best to overcome the hurdles stacked against them is a moving experience.

This was first published in 1982, so some of the content is obviously going to feel dated and predictable today. What is surprising is how much of the content still feels contemporary even forty years down the line. The message it puts across is still highly relevant. It shatters all stereotypes that conservatives might have about homosexuality, lesbians in particular.

If only modern YA authors take a cue from this book! This is how YA romance should be written. Not sparks or thunder at first sight. Not gushing loins or heaving bosoms. A true soul-to-soul connection that delivers on romance without going into elaborate physical details.

My copy of the book (published in 2007, on the 25th anniversary of the book) includes an interview with the author, and this turned out to be the perfect addition to the book. The author spoke of her own experience growing up and coming out as a lesbian in 1950s USA. It’s no wonder she was able to portray Liza’s and Annie’s struggles so effectively in the book.

You want a further reason to read it? The book has been banned from many school libraries and publicly burned in Kansas City. What better way to challenge the status quo than to make a grab at a banned novel!

The book is iconic for a reason. If you want a beautiful teen love story where the romance is appealing and the struggles are real, do try.

4.25 stars from me.

One favourite quote:
“Don't punish yourselves for people's ignorant reactions to what we all are. Don't let ignorance win. Let love.”

***********************
Join me on the Facebook group, Readers Forever!, for more reviews, book-related discussions and fun. show less

Some books you pick up and it takes you ages to read (see: Ben Hur). Some books you pick up and never finish reading coz you get bored (see: Women in Love). Some books pick up in the middle and leave you gasping for more (see: The Picture of Dorian Gray).

This book is none of those. This book I finished reading in about three hours. This book hit all the right points, and it’s taken me so long to write this review because I couldn’t bring myself to write it and not give it the justice it deserves as a wonderful novel.

I feel a bit of historical context is also important here, first. This novel was written in the 1980s, and takes place in what I believe is the 1970s. The novel was banned for a VERY long time in a lot of public show more libraries, because of its depiction of homosexuality as the main romance in the novel. The main characters of the novel, Annie and Liza, fall very quickly and very deeply in love, which must have twisted a few panties back when this novel first came out. A cursory search shows that the novel is actually the 44th most challenged novel by censorship in the United States in the 1980s.

But here’s why this novel is so important for the LGBT community. When reading this novel, while it’s not got the WOW factor that some other novels might have in terms of writing, the story line is happy. Imagine that – a queer story line where nobody dies in the end. That’s a big leap there, considering that the majority of queer characters in the media up to that point had been mercilessly killed off in their depictions.

Liza, as the novel’s main narrator, is actually a very wonderful narrator who actually gives you an insight into her emotions, not making it too emotional and trying to show you what her side of the story is without undermining anything that happened, or placing the blame on others. Liza takes full accountability for her actions and acknowledges that some things she said or did in the course of the story she’s telling might have been terrible decisions. Liza is a mature narrator, and I like how she tells her story.

What I also like about this novel is how realistic the characters feel. Liza goes through her own moments of doubt and internal homophobia, questioning if what she feels is even right or real, but she also goes through her moments of falling in love for the first time that makes you blind to all other consequences and situations. Liza is, really and truly, all of us when falling in love for the first time.

I don’t want to tell you how the novel will play out, because there’s a lot more to the story than just two girls who happen to fall in love. All I can really tell you is that you have to sit down on a quiet evening, switch off your phone, and get ready for your heart to crack open just a smidge (or maybe more than that) while you’re reading this novel.

Final rating: 6/5. Honestly, though the writing isn’t perfect, it’s one of my favourites for the story line alone. show less

Fantastic. It's obvious why Annie On My Mind is a classic, and it's not only because this was one of the very first YA books with gay main characters and a happy ending. I don't usually enjoy straight-up (ha) romance stories, but Gardener avoids the usual obnoxious style where it's obvious how the characters are going wrong and they're oblivious. Instead, when Liza and Annie argue, it's complicated by homophobia and Liza is, at least in retrospect, thoughtful and realistic.

The scene where their secret relationship is discovered is like a punch in the stomach. But the morality isn't totally clear cut, and Annie and Liza struggle to keep their guilt about things that are legitimately their fault disentangled from the things that their show more society is guilty for and from the guilt one feels about being gay.

The ending could have felt rushed, but it didn't to me. I was as delighted as they were. I would protest about how it's their first relationship and those usually don't last forever, but in the interview with Nancy Gardner in the back, she explains that she married her high school girlfriend, so it's understandable!

One thing that did bother me all out of proportion to how prominent it was was an extended metaphor towards the end with white=good, pure and black=evil, twisted. Made me think of the MLK speech. show less

when i was 12, i checked this out from the library. i let it sit in my closet untouched for 3 weeks (at 12 i didn’t quite grasp the humor of that) because i was scared to read it, and then i returned it to the library and never thought about it again. 8 years later, i have finally read it, and even though it didn’t do much for adult me, i’m just thinking about how much it would’ve meant to my 12-year-old self if i’d read it back then. now i’m sad that i denied myself so much validation out of fear. it feels wrong to rate this, so i’m not going to try. i just wish i could’ve experienced this book for the first time back when i really needed it. gay people are so strong

A very sweet book I'd recommend for everyone! This is less about homosexuality than the complications that arise from falling in love with the "wrong" person, and the romance in here is very tenderly, very sympathetically portrayed, and despite those weird affectations in dialogue and mannerism that seem recurring in all 70s/80s YA fiction (who talks like this??) is realistic. I relate more to GLBT lit for kids than regular lit for kids because it deals with stuff outside the typical straight lady paradigms of shopping, boys, whatever. I read this after watching "Heavenly Creatures", because even though I don't identify as a matricidal young lesbian, I relate to that movie intensely. Same here: we're kind of reconciled to the show more impossibility of their relationship early on and their outsider status, so the book explores more complex emotions, the girls have hobbies outside of one another, they're more interesting and more dynamic than say, Bella from Twilight, or any of the Judy Blume characters praying for big tits and true love. The prose in here is surprisingly nice, totally navigable for pre-teens but with touches of real grace and eloquence too. Lovely! show less

The story of two high school girls who meet in their senior year, become fast and close friends, and then move from friendship to love. They try to keep their relationship a secret because they worry that their families and friends won't understand, and when they are discovered, those worst fears become reality.
I understand why this book, published in 1982, made the 100 Banned Books list, as I suspect it had all kinds of conservative knickers in all kinds of twists. It's a great book, though, and the love story between Liz and Annie is lovingly and well told, and the uproar caused by their relationship is deftly depicted in what seems to me likely accurate terms. Recommended.