Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, 404 pages.
1954 is not a very good year to be a Chinese lesbian. Even in San Francisco, historically one of the safer places for people who love differently, there are police raids on gay bars and criminal charges. This is the situation Lily Hu is in. She is seventeen and living in Chinatown during the Red Scare. She's also falling in love with one of her classmates who she thinks (hopes?) might be falling in love with her too. And when they start going together to the Telegraph Club, a lesbian bar where a "male impersonator" performs, Lily quickly confirms many things she only suspected about herself. But, in a place and time when discovery would be life-shattering, the stakes of first love are high.
I've been meaning to read this for quite a while, and I'm glad I finally got to it! I actually read the first seed of this novel in a short story in the All Out anthology I wrote about last summer, which I really liked, and which inspired me to pursue this novel. Lo clearly did a lot of research, and I found the whole novel to be a really interesting historical snapshot. I think I tend to prefer my books a little plot heavier than this one is, but I still enjoyed it. The romance was sweet and I liked the characters.
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