60th read of 2026:
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
A beautiful story about Lily, a young Chinese American teenage girl, as she comes of age in 1950s San Francisco and discovers that she’s a lesbian. Lo seamlessly weaves history and other narratives into the plot to give readers a fully rounded picture of Lily’s world. We get to know her parents and her beloved aunt, who works for JPL as a computer. Lily herself is great at math and dreams of space. Her love of sci-fi pulp novels causes her to find lesbian pulp, and in her math class, she and Kath (eventually Lily’s love interest) are the only girls.
Lo captures social undercurrents like the “threat” of Communism, China’s Cultural Revolution, the Red Scare affecting immigrants, women as computers, cross-dressing laws, and more, while letting each character have their own motivations.
Like a good YA protagonist, Lily doesn’t always understand all the complex issues intersecting in her life, but she moves through them to gain a greater sense of self.
5/5 stars
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