Hello all! Today I am back with another book by Malinda Lo. She wrote Ash, a retelling of Cinderella. This post is about Last Night at the Telegraph Club. It’s not a fantasy book as Ash was, it is still fiction though.
So the book takes place in the 1950s in California and it follows Lily Hu, a Chinese American girl, during her last year in high school. I want to give some historical context before I actually discuss the book. So the 1950s in America were a time of growing tensions between democratic ideologies and communist ideologies. This meant that immigrants and their children from countries with communist ideologies had to be very careful about how they acted and who they associated with for fear of being deported, this issue is a theme that we can see basically through the whole book. It's not front and center but it is there. This tension also caused a lot of immigrant families to keep within their own communities, like Chinese people stuck together in Chinatown and the Italian community stuck together in their own borough, and so on. Another thing is that even the suggestion of being gay was disastrous, it might have been legal but it was not well accepted then. These issues keep coming up during the book, and during Lily trying to understand herself and her feelings and accepting all that.
We see Lily navigate friendships she has had for years with other Chinese Americans while also developing a new relationship with Kathleen, an American girl from her school, that her other Chinese friends don’t seem to like. The book shows us a young love developing in a time where it was dangerous to even suggest being gay. I really liked that we see hints of Lily questioning herself in the beginning and it becomes more and more obvious that she likes girls, while also seeing that she has to be so careful about who she shares this secret with. She can’t tell her best friend or her family because not only will they not understand, they also won’t accept it and/or support her. Lily can’t fall back on her Chinese community in regards to this aspect of her life, so we get to see how Lily finds the community that will understand her and everything she is going through. This is where Kathleen comes in.
Kathleen and Lily’s story starts in the bathroom where they bump into each other. This encounter and a coincidence of them being in the same group during a class activity really sets off their relationship. They start off as friends and eventually end up as something more. Even though it is fairly obvious to the reader that both these girls are gay and Lily definitely has feelings for Kathleen, they are still careful with each other. They tiptoe around the topic at first, they don’t really address it right away, until they do and Kathleen and Lily find people that are like they are and can understand and support them. It was interesting to see what is nowadays generally considered a normal teenage relationship, start and grow in completely different circumstances. I think the end of the book is where we can really see how different and scary those times were. It’s not exactly a sad ending, I would say it’s more realistic for the time that the book is set in. I can keep going on about the book but I’m going to stop here before I give too much away.
SAPPINESS SCALE: HAPPY + MOPEY
Thanks for reading!
Ju
Comments