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storytimed 's review for:
Dress Codes for Small Towns
by Courtney C. Stevens
For a book that's supposed to be about bi kids, Dress Codes for Small Towns was painfully straight. Okay, yeah, subvert expectations, whatever, but it's not actually a subversion of expectations to focus on a heterosexual romance the whole book only to throw the lesbians a bone with the barely-developed winning love interest.
It's not actually woke to have a book flirt with grappling with homophobia and then conclude that actually everything is fine and the homophobic people changed their minds, and aren't YOU the bigoted one to assume that small-town folks couldn't be down with the gays? It's not actually woke to be okay having a bi girl protagonist but dismiss the possibility of having the supposedly bi boy actually date dudes! It is very much not woke to have Billie's entire emotional landscape center around men, with a token smattering of her female love interest for the ~drama~ of it all, and then still call it LGBTQIA.
I mean, the prose was fine. I liked the idea of a YA novel where the protagonist dates multiple people and explores and experiments. The sections of Janie that we did get were fine. I honestly would've liked this book if it 1: wasn't sold to me as being a Queer Novel About Queer Youth 2: gave Janie more focus and an actual storyline 3: maybe focus on Davey and Billie being friends instead of spending most of the novel building up a straight romance that the book doesn't even follow through on?
It feels like the writer here liked the idea of writing a cool woke book about a tomboyish bi girl but didn't know how to conceive of a story that wasn't centered around a heterosexual romance. Like she had this small town book about a tomboy who wins a pageant and then decided to add a sexuality plotline and a female love interest at the last minute for woke points. I'm just.... very disappointed here.
It's not actually woke to have a book flirt with grappling with homophobia and then conclude that actually everything is fine and the homophobic people changed their minds, and aren't YOU the bigoted one to assume that small-town folks couldn't be down with the gays? It's not actually woke to be okay having a bi girl protagonist but dismiss the possibility of having the supposedly bi boy actually date dudes! It is very much not woke to have Billie's entire emotional landscape center around men, with a token smattering of her female love interest for the ~drama~ of it all, and then still call it LGBTQIA.
I mean, the prose was fine. I liked the idea of a YA novel where the protagonist dates multiple people and explores and experiments. The sections of Janie that we did get were fine. I honestly would've liked this book if it 1: wasn't sold to me as being a Queer Novel About Queer Youth 2: gave Janie more focus and an actual storyline 3: maybe focus on Davey and Billie being friends instead of spending most of the novel building up a straight romance that the book doesn't even follow through on?
It feels like the writer here liked the idea of writing a cool woke book about a tomboyish bi girl but didn't know how to conceive of a story that wasn't centered around a heterosexual romance. Like she had this small town book about a tomboy who wins a pageant and then decided to add a sexuality plotline and a female love interest at the last minute for woke points. I'm just.... very disappointed here.