A review by malayapapaya
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

emotional hopeful reflective sad

• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.75

Writing this review a few months later, so I have a little distance from it, but wow wow wow. This was one of my first forays into queer fiction since coming out as a lesbian myself, and the way it explores the feeling of discovering this on your own in some isolation plus the intersection of this process with being an Asian woman was so so life-affirming as a fellow API lesbian. Even if the world is vastly different in many ways, there are so many emotions that resonated and hit in the best way. Also, reading about what sapphic culture was like back in the 1950s was really moving and made me so excited to move to a city and find my own queer community. I feel very grateful to not live in an environment where it's as risky as it was then, but it was so surreal to read this and know that Lily is around the same age my grandparents were and that this stuff is not that far off from the way things are now. The book treats all these subjects so beautifully while also being realistic about what the characters were facing in the time. It made me want to start learning about Asian and queer culture in San Francisco, which I have heard about but don't know too intimately.