A Good Jumping off Point: Ask the Passengers by A.S. King

As I begin my explorations with YA LGBTQ Lit (wow that's a lot of letters) I had to do a little search on modern LGBTQ lit being published--modern meaning in the last 7-10 years. I found out that according to YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) "There are 55 queer YA novels being published in in 2012, meaning that queer YA is just 1.6% of all YA coming out this year" and those numbers haven't really increased since then.

So, to start off the Lesbian literature section of my directed study I began with Ask the Passengers by A.S. King.

My initial review: lackluster but good.

When looking for outstanding teen literature this book is more the quintessential coming of age novel that is highly prevalent in the LGBTQ field. Astrid Jones is quirky and clever and if judging the book on her personality alone, then it would be a very good book. The basic idea of the novel is that Astrid lives in a small close minded town ironically named "Unity Valley" after moving there from New York. Her sister does everything in her power to fit in, even though she plays field hockey (and according to her "not all field hockey players are lesbians, c'mon, get a life, even though there are like two on the other team but whatever"). Her mom is high strung and basically dislikes Astrid, and her father smokes pot in the shed and builds bird houses to cope with the fact that the biggest scandal in his workplace is the STAPLER THIEF.

Astrid spends her life in school enjoying philosophy, hating trigonometry and being an all around outcast. She has a "hidden" girlfriend named Dee who keeps pressuring her to go farther than she's really ready to and hiding the secret that her two best friends, the homecoming couple, are actually both gay and using each other as beards.

For the most part the dialogue is wonderful and flows easily even as Astrid speaks about Zeno and the fact that his idea that "motion doesn't exist" is stupid. The best part for me was when Astrid, trying to find a way to cope in a town of fake love, goes out to her backyard to stare up at the sky and send love to the passengers in airplanes. Often times her mind drifts up to the plane and lets the reader see what's happening in the plane to lend a theme of magical realism.

One thing that bothered me with the book was the fact that at the beginning of the novel Astrid claims to have liked a boy, romantically, but when her family discovers Dee and demands for her to figure out her sexual identity the idea of bisexuality never comes up. A general consensus amongst the LGBTQ community is that the B and T of that alphabet soup tend to be mostly overlooked or minimized. While I understand this is a "lesbian text" it still strikes me that Astrid being bi wasn't even a possibility.

My overall rating depending on what it could add to the LGBT teen lit canon, creativity, and general story-ness? Three stars out of five. It's a good, basic text with a good message for something just coming into lesbian literature and the writing is very nice, it's just not all that different from a lot of coming out texts focused for teen readers.