Twelve-year-olds cousins Alice and Bee don’t know much about each other or about why their mothers (sisters to each other) are estranged. When they connect at their grandparents’ anniversary party, however, they quickly become friends despite many differences. The green-haired Alice is a roller-derby player and social justice activist from liberal Seattle, whose mother married a Jewish man. Bee is more academically minded, from a conservative, church-going Lutheran family in Minnesota, whose parents are divorcing.
The girls bond over a shared love of reading, and their book discussion involves LGBTQ-inclusive titles Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World, Hurricane Child, and The Best at It. Bee, it turns out, coming to realize her attraction to girls, but knows she has to hide this from her mother. (Alice, for her part, seems to be cis and straight, although she has gay aunts, as well as bi, trans, and questioning friends, and is clearly an ally.)
The girls’ time together is cut short, however, when their grandfather makes homophobic comments about Alice’s paternal aunt, her wife, and their upcoming baby. Angry, Alice’s mother takes Alice home.
The girls continue to communicate via text, although Bee’s mother has forbidden her to do so. But just as they hatch a plan to visit, the COVID pandemic strikes, upsetting all their lives. Family tensions grow as the different parts of the family respond differently to the pandemic and to the growing Black Lives Matter movement and rising police violence against Black people. With insight from Alice, plus her own growing sense of identity and justice, Bee comes to see the narrowness of her family’s views.
Co-authors Dori Hillestad Butler and Sunshine Bacon importantly don’t make this into a story about queer people versus religion, however; Bee’s father, who no longer lives with her, goes to an LGBTQ-affirming church that is part of a different and more welcoming Lutheran denomination, and Bee finds a resonance there.
But growing societal and familial challenges still threaten to drive Bee and Alice apart. Can they heal their friendship—and maybe even help their entire family to reconcile?
There’s a lot packed in here: coming out, family secrets, COVID, the Black Lives Matter movement, effective allyship, abortion rights, socioeconomic inequalities, and two girls trying to make sense of it all. The narrative, told in the girls’ alternating perspectives and heavy on text-message threads between them, keeps the topics from feeling pedantic, though; instead, they’re personal and relevant. And there’s a larger theme, too, about the many things that can fracture families, from interpersonal issues to pandemics and violence—and about the ways we can start to heal both families and our wider society. A recommended title.
Alice, Bee, and their families are White; two of Alice’s friends are people of color.
Content warning: Death of a close relative from COVID.
