A new picture book and a new middle-grade book, each a lyrical tale about two girls in love, are the gorgeous stories queer kids deserve to have written about themselves.
The Wishing Flower, by A.J. Irving, illustrated by Kip Alizadeh (Knopf), is an ode to finding connection, understanding, and a first crush. Birdie is a quiet girl who loves books, nature, and blowing on “wishing flowers” (dandelion puffs). Yet “Birdie felt inside out at home and at school. Quiet as starlight and shy like a pill bug.”
When a new girl, Sunny, with “freckles like constellations and a nature name,” arrives in Birdie’s class one day, however, Birdie is entranced. Birdie wants to say something to her, but “two dragonflies played tag in Birdie’s tummy.” Birdie’s next wish is to be brave.
Sunny shows an interest in getting to know Birdie and Birdie does indeed grow braver. They play together after school, braid each other’s hair, and swing “so high their toes kissed the clouds.” It’s pure exhilaration. When they find a wishing flower and make a wish together, one says, “Mine already came true,” and the other responds, “Mine, too.” We don’t know which one of them spoke first, but it doesn’t matter. The feeling is mutual.
Author A. J. Irving masterfully shows but doesn’t tell as the girls sense a connection and grow close; the prose is spare but full of beautifully crafted imagery and dialog. Kip Alizadeh’s warm images echo the girls’ swirling emotions and sweetly capture Birdie’s blush when Sunny first speaks to her.
This is one of very few picture books about a crush between two young girls. (Others include Love, Violet and Chabelita’s Heart: El corazón de Chabelita.) Because even the most innocuous kids’ books with LGBTQ characters are unfortunately liable to misinterpretation these days, let me be very clear: This is (as are the others) a perfectly appropriate book for young children. The girls do no more than hold hands. Yet the affirmation here of girls who have same-sex crushes at young ages is important and timely, for they deserve to see themselves in books, know that they are not the only ones to feel as they do, and know that it is all right. Their toes, too, can kiss the clouds.
The Song of Us, by Kate Fussner (Katherine Tegen Books). Fussner’s debut is a novel-in-verse, loose retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, though familiarity with the original is not necessary to understand and appreciate this modern, queer version. Seventh-grader Olivia is a poet, and when new girl Eden, a musician, shows up to the Poetry Club one day, it’s love at first sight. Through alternating poems in each girl’s voice, Fussner shows them starting a relationship, sharing a first kiss, and filling with the flush of new love.
Olivia’s dad is rarely home and her mother has depression. Eden’s mother has left her father, who remains strict and angry. It is easy to see how the girls find solace in each other. Eden isn’t out, though, and doesn’t want anyone to know about their relationship. She starts hanging out with other, more popular girls and trying to fit in. When Olivia suspects infidelity, however, it is Olivia who uses her words to harm and causes their relationship to rupture.
The verses take us from love to its broken aftermath, and then to Olivia’s determined plan to win Eden back through the power of poetry, as Eden reevaluates who she is and who she wants to be. Fussner deploys various meters and structures to delve into the emotions of first love, middle-school social pressures, family relationships, and coming of age as deftly as I’ve ever seen it done, while also keeping the plot suspenseful and moving. This is not navel-gazing poetry, but poetry as passion, action, and emotion. I also appreciate that Fussner doesn’t over-explain; sometimes there is as much between the lines as in them. Put this novel of love and its reverberations on your must-read list; it is a powerful and moving story and highly recommended.