Stevie is eleven and loves reading and sea-creatures. She lives with her mum, and she’s been best friends with Andrew since forever. Stevie’s mum teases her that someday they’ll get married, but Stevie knows that won’t ever happen. There’s a girl at school that she likes more. A lot more. Actually, she’s a bit confused about how much she likes her. It’s nothing like the way she likes Andrew. It makes her fizz inside. That’s a new feeling, one she doesn’t understand. Stevie needs to find out if girls can like girls – love them, even – but it’s hard to get any information, and she’s too shy to ask out loud about it. But maybe she can find an answer in a book. With the help of a librarian, Stevie finds stories of girls loving girls, and builds up her courage to share the truth with her mum.
Little Island
I adored this book. I made a note of pages with favourite quotes and cannot find my copy (thanks for sending it to me Nina) anywhere…I must have lent it to someone, I hope I get it back! Obviously my favourite quotes were about just how special the library and librarian are! But the whole book is just beautiful and lyrical and perfectly pitched for a middle grade audience.
Meg Grehan kindly wrote a piece for the blog:
On writing THE DEEPEST BREATH, and on queer representation in books and the media
About a year ago I wrote an article about how queer characters so often get stuck with sad endings. I tried my best to be inclusive in the language I used, I wrote at least five drafts and I spent hours researching the history of this trend to learn and share why it’s so pervasive. Within a couple hours of the article being posted it had over a hundred comments, almost all of them
negative. I tried my best to stay away, to convince myself not to read them, to just close the tab and walk away. But like a moth to a flame I just kept going back, refreshing and refreshing. I watched them flood in, most of them seemed like their writers hadn’t even read the article but just wanted to spread vitriol about the subject or the inclusive language I’d used in the title. But some of them, a surprisingly large number of them, said something along the lines of this: “I’m straight and I’ve never used a character in a book as instructions on how to behave.”
I hated these comments, I couldn’t help it, no matter how hard I tried to let them roll of my back they climbed up and latched on. The point of the article was to discuss the importance of happy endings, of positivity, and all it seemed to have accomplished was to give angry people another place to leave hateful words.
Queer representation in the media is something I’m passionate about, especially when it comes to books. I’m all about kindness and acceptance, with my books all I strive to do is to make a little space safe, to try to make life even the tiniest bit softer and easier for anyone who might find themselves between the pages. Seeing so many people disregard the importance of representation made me feel deflated. Seeing yourself in the books you read makes you feel validated, it helps you understand and accept yourself. It affirms your existence. So many of us need to see aspects of ourselves, especially those that make us different, to know that we aren’t
alone. It doesn’t mean we need instructions on to behave, on how to be gay or bi or however we identify. It means we need to feel less alone. To disregard this need because you don’t share it is cruel.
It is a privilege to never have to look for yourself, to have it be so entirely normalised that you needn’t notice or pay it any attention. To be the default.
A year on I still think about those comments sometimes, about what a strange overwhelming experience it all was. If I was to respond to those comments, which for the sake of my sanity I didn’t, I would ask their writers to have a little empathy. I would tell them that opening a book
and finding a character who identifies how I do was an experience I waited such a long time for, one that fundamentally changed how I viewed myself, how I treated myself. I would tell them that it made me stop thinking of myself as a weird, as someone who might always feel lonely. I would ask them to understand that just because they don’t need it doesn’t mean no one does.
Meg Grehan’s THE DEEPEST BREATH, a beautifully written, poetic, lyrical and insightful story of one girl’s coming into full awareness of who she is, and who she might want to love (Little Island), is out now.
