carrot2025 's review for:

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

5.0

emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective 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: Complicated

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I absolutely adore this book. It was the perfect capture of the time period and being a lesbian. The sweet, forbidden teenage love story is always a great plot in my opinion but to add the amazing historical accuracy of homophobia and racism just makes it even better. It almost feels like I'm reading a diary of someone during that time.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Homophobia, Racial slurs, Racism, Deportation

This book handles so many of these important themes in an amazing way. As much as we have made progress in this world it's really important to keep telling these stories of the truth of the past. The author chosing to use period accurate words for minorities is just amazing. It really puts you into these characters feelings and what it was like to live during this time.

The bar raid made me absolutely sob. It was the great representation of it and I can tell the author really put a lot of research into it.

The common and prevalent topics of this book, is something many could argue is wrong but it is all done with so much respect and care that I can tell the author genuinely wants to tell the true story of the time.