Girl’s Girl

It’s giving summer break dialled up the max: boredom, ennui, the steady plink of hours dripping slowly by, like swollen water droplets hitting the bottom of a well. Time works differently in summer, when anything feels possible but nothing actually happens. When you’re fifteen, every moment feels make-or-break, charged with the high drama of teenagehood.

And the summer romance! The unbearable anguish of first love! First queer love, no less. Something as simple as a crush can derail everything: the agony of she loves me, she loves me not, petals plucked from an unsuspecting daisy. A single kiss has the power to break hearts, destroy friendships—destroy lives, even!

Girl’s Girl paints a familiar picture of girlhood: lip gloss and crop tops, stolen vodka and never-ending sleepovers. It’s when you’re more comfortable wearing your bestie’s clothing than your own, spending the night in her bed. To be a teenage girl is for your body to belong to your friends—but what happens when that friendship is no longer quite so innocent?

Growing up as the older brother to two younger sisters, I had a front-row seat to the particular world of teenage girlhood: the sleepovers and inside jokes, the alliances that shifted overnight, the intensity of friendships that felt like everything. And yet, what Sonia Feldman captures in Girl's Girl goes far beyond any one gender's experience. (I had inside jokes and sleepovers and watched friends play games on their computer for hours, too!) This is a story about the universal awkwardness of becoming. The self-discovery that has nowhere to hide when you're stuck in the same suburb, the same summer, with the same people you love and don't know how to love.

After an unexpected kiss, fifteen-year-old Mina watches the delicate balance of her trio begin to shift and what follows can only be described as that particular summer urgency we all remember, where everything feels simultaneously fleeting and permanently etched. Sonia Feldman renders it all with startling honesty: the gossip, the selfies, the boredom, the longing. That specific sensation of being on the edge of something you can't yet name. It made me both cringe and long for my younger self. And for that, it gets The Nod by Gays Reading.