Reviews with content warning for Gore - Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Beautiful and heartbreaking. I love how much is going on in this book. Lily doesn't just realize she's a lesbian and fall in love. She finds queer community and starts learning the culture. She thinks about future careers. She navigates her shifting relationship with her childhood best friend. She worries about her father being deported, and about whether her being gay increases the risk of that. She tries to balance her love for her family, community, and culture of origin with her love for herself and her need to be true to her own identity. She faces her family's homophobia and the mostly white lesbian community's racism and xenophobia. Other characters have lives independent from Lily's, and sometimes there's friction where those lives overlap.

This isn't just "realizing you're gay and falling in love"; it's "realizing you're gay and falling in love while living in a world where everything else keeps happening."

Content Warnings

percys_panda_pillow_pet's review

Go to review page

adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

If you are looking for a book that is relevant to current politics and culture, while also giving a glimpse into the past, this is the book for you. This book is about a young woman coming to terms with her sexuality in 1950s San Francisco, intersecting with her identity as a Chinese American. In San Francisco 1950-something, while queer people have the right to assembly within a bar and male/female impersonators weren't terribly uncommon, they were still a major taboo of American society. Police raids were common on all sorts of charges, particularly drug charges and "indoctrinating the youth".

Right now, in the US, drag, another form of male/female impersonation, is being targeted as being "indecent towards minors" and getting banned. But along with targeting drag, lawmakers are also targeting trans people. Here is a recent article about a law in TN preventing a local club from talking about Transgender Awareness in their school: https://www.businessinsider.com/tennessee-school-students-flyer-transgender-awareness-month-law-2023-3

I found this part particularly relevant to this book: "Lee on Thursday also signed a law banning "adult cabaret performances" from being performed "on public property or in a location where the adult cabaret performance could be viewed by a person who is not an adult" in Tennessee. The law identifies "male and female impersonators" — drag kings and drag queens — as adult cabaret performers."

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo directly addresses this sort of bigoted targeting, only it at least seems to fit in the historical setting of the book. Not so much today. I know that this is a lot for a book review, but I felt that I had to address these current issues as they helped shape my feelings about the novel.

As for the writing, I thought Lo did a fantastic job of doing her research and I loved the almost vignette length of the chapters and scenes. It made it very easy to stay engaged with the more character-driven plot. I thought the movement through time was interesting, though the timeline of things did confuse me, even with the visual aids throughout the book. Once I just ignored them, though, I didn't have any worries about when what was happening as Lo is great at setting the period. The tension throughout the book was great as the main character, Lily, works to unravel her feelings about women, especially a few important characters. The main romance doesn't come up until the latter half of the book, but I didn't mind and actually liked the slow burn, as I am not a fan of rushed feelings. It made sense with the characters and the setting and was very relatable personally haha.

I definitely recommend checking this book out if you can, if you like queer romance, if you like historical novels, if you like a good representation of different kinds of people, and if you like books relevant to today's topics.

See you next review!

Content Warnings

spookily's review

Go to review page

emotional tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

bobbi's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

Content Warnings

cozyscones's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Content Warnings

lolajh's review

Go to review page

emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

FUCK. The last 100 pages of this book absolutely broke me, even though I knew going into this it would have to be intense when it’s about racism and lesbiphobia in the 50’s. Regardless, I loved this book. It has everything, lesbians and the usage of queer terminology such as lesbian, as well as butch and femme, which I absolutely loved to see.

Lily Hu. What a fantastic character. A Chinese American lesbian dealing with not just racism and lesbiphobia separately, but as overlapping things that create much more of an impact than one of these things by themselves. The portrayal of Lily’s lesbianism was portrayed a bit iffy in some parts, such as describing her intense focus on other girls’ bodies, but for the most part was described as more than skin-deep.

Lily’s love for Kath, a butch lesbian, was so bittersweet, and a lovely depiction of lesbian love. Their relationship transitions so seamlessly from friends to lovers, and despite the context they are in, neither have internalised homophobia about their lesbianism, and there are never any moments of shame between them after they show affection, which is something quite prominent in a lot of queer books done even in present context. Seeing Lily’s love for butches in this book where the butch is the love interest and femme as the mc was lovely, because I got to see Lily’s admiration for butch lesbians and for Kath. I can clearly see Lily as a femme, whilst it isn’t stated as clearly as Kath being butch, because of how she expresses her femininity in no way for a man, and because of her true love for butch lesbians. They are clearly Lily’s type; her love for butches was just so beautiful to see, and so different from traditionally feminine (but not femme) lesbian stories.

There are also sex scenes in this book, and the characters are both seventeen, which isn’t too young I guess, but because of how the scenes were portrayed in such a beautiful way, I still found them to be enjoyable. They’re my age, and it’s not unrealistic for people under the age of 18 to have sexual thoughts and interactions, so I do think it’s fine. I loved how intimate the scenes were portrayed; the consent and communication and them not at all being something directed for the male gaze was beautiful. It was less about lust and pleasure than just pure intimacy and love between the characters, something so pure I really admired.

Content Warnings

talonsontypewriters's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Content Warnings

ahallen's review

Go to review page

challenging emotional informative reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Content Warnings

More...