Lesbian Love Story Wins National Book Award for Young People’s Literature

Last Night at the Telegraph Club, a young adult lesbian love story set in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1954, yesterday won the prestigious National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. In her acceptance speech, author Malinda Lo urged viewers to resist right-wing efforts to remove books about LGBTQ people and people of color from school and library shelves.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club (Dutton — Amazon; Bookshop) is a dazzling love story with a Chinese American protagonist, rich in historical and cultural detail, yet never letting the details overwhelm the focus on the characters and their personalities. Lo is keenly aware of the complexities of intersectionality, but the serious topics never come across as pedantic; they are all just different threads of the protagonist’s identities and experiences, which combine to make her who she is and shape her interactions with the world. As I said in my full review, young queer teens deserve this lovely coming-of-age love story; they deserve the knowledge that queer people have a history that predates Stonewall and that our lives were (and are) as bound up as anyone’s in the social and political happenings of their community and country. They also deserve books that are as masterfully crafted as this one. I also wholeheartedly recommend it to adult readers looking for a queer love story or historical novel. I wish there had been books like this when we were growing up.

In her acceptance speech, Lo noted that when her first book, Ash, came out in 2009, “it was one of 27 young adult books about LGBTQ characters or issues published that year.” This year, there were “hundreds.” She added, however:

The growth has been incredible, but the opposition to our stories has also grown. This year, schools across the country are facing significant right-wing pressure to remove books about people of color, LGBTQ people, and especially transgender people, from classrooms and libraries. I urge every one of you watching to educate yourselves about your school boards and vote in your local elections. 2022 is coming and we need your support to keep our stories on the shelves. Don’t let them erase us.

As I noted last month, all five shortlisted finalists for the Young People’s Literature award this year focused on people with marginalized identities. Three of the five had queer protagonists: joining Last Night at the Telegraph Club were Kyle Lukoff’s Too Bright to See (Dial Books — Amazon; Bookshop; full review), a coming-of-age story and a mystery/ghost story, told from the perspective of 11-year-old Bug, who is realizing his identity as a transgender boy; and Shing Yin Khor’s The Legend of Auntie Po (Kokila — Amazon; Bookshop; full review), a graphic novel about a Chinese American girl living at a Sierra Nevada logging camp in the late 19th-century. Mei, who has a crush on the foreman’s daughter, finds strength in the face of camp politics and systemic racism by reinventing the stories of Paul Bunyan to star an elderly Chinese matriarch.

The other two finalists were Amber McBride’s Me (Moth) (Feiwel & Friends — Amazon; Bookshop), a YA novel-in-verse about a Black teen girl grieving the deaths of her family, and a Navajo/Diné teen boy who crosses her path; and Kekla Magoon’s Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People (Candlewick – Amazon; Bookshop), a comprehensive history of the Black Panther Party and its community activism.

This is the second year in a row that a book whose protagonist (and author) is a queer person of color has won the award; last year it was Kacen Callender’s King and the Dragonflies. We absolutely need to keep LGBTQ-inclusive books and books about people of color on the shelves because children and youth need to see positive representations of these identities. They need to see themselves reflected and they need to learn about others in the world around them. Increasingly, though, keeping those books off the shelves also means keeping children and youth from some of the best young people’s literature around, bar none.

Congratulations to Lo!

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