Grl2grl

Peters, J. A. (2007). Grl2grl. New York: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN-10: 0-316-01343-9

Why read this book

Next time you are looking to relax or escape, read some really good writing about girls who like girls. Reading these short stories is as easy as watching TV, but they’re way better for your mind and your spirit.

Plot summary

These ten short stories cover a lot of territory, but they have in common that they are all first-person narratives from the mouths of high school girls who like other girls. A couple of the stories are about the people who make life harder for these girls (“Boi,” “Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder“), but most of them are just about the girls. Girls trying to get to know someone special (“Passengers,” “Outside/Inside”), girls trying to get over each other (“After Alex,” “TIAD”), and girls in a lot of pain (“Can’t Stop the Feeling,” “Stone Cold Butch”). One story features a nascent courtship via sports (“On the Floor”), and one features the climax of a long courtship via music (“Two-Part Invention”). And all these girls are people you’d like to know, young people who are embracing life as they struggle to be who they want and need to be.

Critical evaluation

One challenge with a collection of short stories is to develop common themes that help the stories fit together while providing enough variety in setting, plot, characters, and form to keep them from sounding too much like each other. Julie Ann Peters accomplishes both of these goals in Grl2grl. The young lesbian (and, in one case, transgender) voices work together to present a whole movement of girls ready to make their way in the world, but the voices are quite distinct from each other, from Mariah’s hesitate steps toward her first GSA meeting to the unnamed basketball player whose every move against her opponent on the court is a double entendre. A lot of the action happens in schools (classrooms, hallways, a gym, a storeroom off the library), but some of it happens at work, online, and driving down the highway. Although a couple of the narrators suffer serious abuse, overall the collection leaves the reader with an appreciation of the enormous potential for love and happiness that the protagonists embody.

About the author

Julie Anne Peters was born in New York in 1952 but grew up in Colorado. She still lives there, now with her partner Sheri, whom she met in college, “and we’ve been together ever since” (Peters, n.d.). She worked as a teacher and then as a computer software person before turning to writing in the late 1980s. She has published 15 books for tweens and young adults, many of them with LGBTQ themes, including her most recent novel, Rage: A Love Story. To be published in January 2010 is By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead, which explores teen suicide. Peters maintains a Web site and a blog.

Genre: LGBTQ, Short stories

Curriculum ties

As noted above, Peters presents an array of engaging voices, which makes this a useful collection for teaching first-person narration in a creative writing class.

Book-talking ideas

Emphasize that (for the most part) this is not a collection of stories about oppressed young lesbians seeking their identity and getting beat up but a collection of stories about high school girls dealing with love and romance who happen to be finding it with other girls.

Reading level/interest age

Although I think these stories were written with older teens in mind, many middle school students would find the reading level accessible.

Challenge issues

The sexual abuse described briefly in “Stone Cold Butch” and in more detail in “Boi” might be the peg on which those opposed to including LGBTQ issues in public discourse would hang their challenges to this collection. Otherwise, there are no sex scenes, violence, or profanity.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

• Remind the challenger how important it is for all readers to be inspired by stories that relate to their lives.

Why I chose to read this book

I’m looking for material to use in a high school LGBTQ course that I hope to teach this spring, and I thought short stories would be a good resource.