The first LGBTQ-inclusive picture book of 2022 is also the first ever about a young girl with a crush on another girl! This celebration of young love is charmingly written and beautifully illustrated—a must-have for any inclusive bookshelf!
Love, Violet, by Charlotte Sullivan Wild and illustrated by Charlene Chua (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), stars a young White girl named Violet, whose short, dyed, asymmetrical haircut and purple hoodie immediately hint at a certain queer aesthetic. Only one person in her class “made Violet’s heart skip”—Mira, who has darker skin and abundant curls. Violet dreams of “astounding Mira with heroic feats” and going on adventures together. She imagines herself clad in an Indiana Jones (or Ridley Jones?) fedora, swinging through a jungle with Mira; sailing a pirate ship together; exploring outer space side by side; and kneeling in armor, presenting Princess Mira with a golden gift.
Violet is shy around Mira in real life, though. As Valentine’s Day draws near, Violet summons her courage and makes Mira a paper valentine. She tucks it under her lucky cowboy hat and heads to school. When the class gives out their valentines, Violet gets nervous and distributes all of hers except for the one to Mira. Can she overcome her fears? As she reflects, she begins to piece together clues that indicate maybe Mira wants to be her valentine. She runs heroically across the playground to find Mira—only to have the wind blow her hat off and drop the valentine into the air.
Never fear, Mira offers a creative solution for the ruined card, and gives Violet a present of her own—a heart-shaped locket with a violet in it. The two of them run off, hand in hand, to adventures!
I absolutely love this book. Wild’s evocative yet spare prose captures Violet’s swirling, whirling feelings towards Mira and her hesitation about Mira’s possible reaction. Chua’s watercolors add further depth and dynamism to the tale. Mostly, though, the story allows these queer children to have what they deserve: happiness, with no one criticizing or questioning their relationship.
Importantly, this is also the first picture book to clearly depict a young girl’s same-gender crush, to the best of my knowledge. Author Wild agrees, noting in a piece at We Need Diverse Books that it “may be the first picture book to celebrate young love between girls!” Yes, despite a surge in LGBTQ-inclusive picture books over the past three years, this has remained a huge gap.
Young boys with same-gender crushes have a few picture books to represent them—When We Love Someone We Sing to Them/Cuando Amamos Cantamos; Jerome By Heart; and From Archie to Zack (though the last unfortunately falls into offensive tropes). Additionally, there are a number of picture books about young boys who are coded as gay (such as Bling Blaine and even much older titles like Oliver Button Is a Sissy and The Boy Who Cried Fabulous). There have been a few fairy tale picture books with female couples falling in love (Maiden & Princess; Maiden Voyage; and for slightly older readers, Princess, Princess Ever After), but the characters in these are older, teens at the least; important representation but not the same as offering young readers images of children the same age as themselves, experiencing feelings that they, too, may be feeling. Another picture book, My Best Friend, shows a close relationship between two girls that is framed explicitly as a friendship (though it could be read with queer overtones).
Additionally, picture books about young trans girls, trans boys, and nonbinary children are happily becoming more plentiful, as are ones about gender creative boys and gender creative girls. Picture books about gender creative girls are, however, still far fewer than those about gender creative boys (although The Spectacular Suit is a recent one I loved), perhaps because gender creative boys are still less accepted by society as a whole; it is understandable that authors and publishers have prioritized giving them support.
Overall, however, as Wild notes at We Need Diverse Books, queer childhoods in general, especially happy ones, are few and far between in picture books. When even books with same-sex parents are still being challenged and banned, it is unfortunate but perhaps not surprising that ones with queer children remain rare, especially ones involving crushes, which the conservative-minded could quickly misinterpret as being about sex (though they’re not).
Wild explained in her piece, “I realized that as a child not one person or story had shown me that queer love (or I) could exist. I’d been ghosted. Meaning: erased.” And ghosting, she said, “is permission to not care.” She therefore wrote Love, Violet as “a story to de-ghost queer childhood.” Despite the need for such books, however, the story, which she wrote in 2011, was rejected over and over by editors who thought its audience would be too narrow.
Kudos to Farrar, Straus and Giroux BYR (part of Macmillan Children’s Publishing) for taking a chance on it. Love, Violet is an engaging, sweet story that addresses both the gap in representation of two girls in love and in girls whose gender expression leans masculine of center. Violet, with her cowboy hat, fedora, and chivalrous imaginings, comes across as a baby butch with a soft heart. And while the book seems very clear that Violet and Mira’s feelings go beyond simple friendship, Wild and Chua also keep things realistic and appropriate for the age group. (Wild said the girls are intended to be about 7 years old.) The girls never kiss or discuss “dating,” much less marriage (as we see in many a queer fairy tale). They simply go off adventuring together, hand in hand.
This book would have hit me like a thunderbolt if I had read it in elementary school, and I might have realized a lot sooner that I was a lesbian. I suspect it will have a similar impact on many young lesbian and bi girls—but it is equally important for children of other identities, to show them that girl-loving-girls exist and may be their peers. And feelings of crushes are universal, too, regardless of gender; stories about them may have a universal appeal. Love, Violet is a must-have for any home or library bookshelf that aspires to a diversity of representation. It’s the perfect book for Valentine’s Day or any day one is thinking about love.
Want more? Here’s a trailer: