| Comments: Book Eval Review: Love and Lies: Marisol’s Story is a companion novel to Wittlinger’s 1999 Printz Honor Hard Love. Marisol plans to spend her year off before she enrolls at Stanford living in an apartment with her best friend Birdie, taking creative writing classes, writing a novel and hopefully finding a girlfriend. Things get complicated when Birdie moves his new boyfriend in with them, Gio - the protagonist of Hard Love who had an unrequited crush on Marisol - ends up in her creative writing class, and the teacher turns out to be Olivia, a young, smart, attractive writer that Marisol is very interested in. Marisol is happy when their relationship seems to take off but has trouble dealing with her new friend Lee, a high school senior who definitely has feelings for Marisol. When things with Olivia don’t quite add up, Marisol has to take stock of what’s important to her. This book is filled with lovely colorful characters and is a great exploration of first love and taking your first steps into adulthood. Sex scenes are alluded to and not graphically depicted. Love and Lies helps fill a much needed void in lesbian young adult literature. Although the book can stand alone, Hard Love is excellent and you should have both available in your library.
Other Thoughts: For some reason I didn’t read this when it first came out, probably because I didn’t love the cover and even though I remember loving Hard Love, I read it so long ago that I didn’t really remember much. I regret waiting! What a great book! I should have known: Sandpiper and Blind Faith are still two of my favorite YA books. I need to add Hard Love to my very long reread list. |
