A review by bookalchemist
Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence by Marion Dane Bauer

3.0

This is a difficult book to review; I have trouble putting aside what I know and where we are now (as my Anglo-Saxon lit professor would put it, my modern biases), and it changes the impact of the stories I think. In the 90s when this published, this book was something of a unique creature and may have made some waves for its existence, so openly talking about what LGBTQIA+ teens and children face in daily life, the inner and outer struggles. Today, it reads like a piece of queer history, and it's so very sad but hopeful. The kind of fiction featuring characters in this community then were about isolation, the burden of loneliness and unhappiness, and focused on the act of coming out. Now, coming out is just the hurdle before trying to figure out dating, navigating life as a trans person in a workplace, or other bigger struggles. Looking at this book now, in some ways it's a little insulting or exclusionary, but that helps show how far we've come. Books can be used as history even when they aren't nonfiction, and not all works of fiction are worth reading just for the content alone (look at booklists for middle and high schools). I think this might be one of those.