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  • STACKED
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  • Categories
    • Audiobooks
    • Book Lists
      • Debut YA Novels
      • Get Genrefied
      • On The Radar
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      • Cover Doubles
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      • Feminism For The Real World Anthology
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Fun & Full of Girl Love: Cherry by Lindsey Rosin

August 8, 2016 |

CherryI’ve stepped back from reviewing this year, in part because it’s such a time-consuming aspect of blogging, and in part because I want to spend the time talking about books that really resonate and that might not otherwise see much attention in the book world. My book piles are growing at a monstrous rate at home, with piles upon piles of ARCs and finished copies and purchased books beside the basket of library books I’ve been working my way through. After what felt like six months of slow reading and a disinterest in reading all together, I’ve been flying through books at a speed I haven’t in a long, long time.

In part because I’ve been reading so many fantastic books.

I spent July reading backlist titles, plowing through a huge number of reads (for me — it’s all relative so the number itself isn’t important). And now with August here, I’ve started incorporating new and forthcoming titles back into my stacks.

And I’m so glad that Cherry by Lindsey Rosin was one that I picked up sooner, rather than later.

When was the last time you picked up a YA book that was not only wildly sex positive but also fun, engaging, funny, and featured an entire case of female characters who love, support, and encourage one another? Cherry could best be described as a contemporary American Pie but with female characters, with a twist of The To-Do List.

Told in third-person, Rosin offers up a story about four girls who’ve been best friends since first grade. There are fewer than 200 days between the time the story begins and their graduation, wherein they’ll be going to far-flung places around the world; while this sort of fear of separation lingers in their world, it’s not the thrust of their story nor their friendship. They’re tight, but they aren’t controlling of one another. They’ve accepted the reality, even if it’s one that they’re not necessarily looking forward to experiencing.

The book opens at Bigg Chill, the frozen yogurt shop that the four girls spend every weekend at in person. It’s their time to catch up and hang out, talk about important and not important things. Layla, a girl who likes to make lists and accomplish the things on that list, tells the rest of the crew that she has three things in mind to accomplish before graduation: she wants to get blonde highlights, she wants to raise one of her grades in an AP class to an A, and she wants to finally have sex with her long-time boyfriend Logan. Her friends consider this and offer up some perspective on the idea of including sex on her to-do list. Isn’t it odd to have that on a list of tasks to accomplish? Shouldn’t it be more than that?

After a long discussion of this — including some wildly realistic discussions of what sex is and isn’t, what masturbation is and isn’t, and who has/has not done things — the girls decide that they’ll make a sex pact. Together, but not together-together, they’ll all have sex before graduation.  There is a mix of emotions surrounding this, from fear to excitement and to the nervous feeling that one girl gets when she realizes that her friends think she’s the only non-virgin and the truth is, she’s never actually had sex.

And then we get to sex.

Cherry follows all four of the girls through the ups and downs of learning about their bodies, as well as learning about what it is they want from a sexual relationship. There is wonderful and frank discussion of masturbation — not just who is and isn’t masturbating, but how one could figure out what it is they like sexually — and there is open and honest discussion of contraception and protection.

But most importantly, and the part that made me realize this book wasn’t just a fun romp (though it is!), is that it showcases a variety of sexual interests and sexualities among the girls. We have straight sex as well as lesbian sex and it is on the page. From the moment that Emma meets Savannah, I hoped that something would spark, and I was pleased at the first kiss. Then the second. Then the fireworks. It was refreshing and truthful and powerful to see lesbian sexual interest right there on the page, presented in a way that was natural and fun and exciting, for both the girls and the readers who will pick this up.

What Rosin smartly does, in addition to highlighting sexual variety in this story, is not offer the easy ways in and out for the girls. There are ups and downs. What seems like the obvious partnerships aren’t necessarily the stories that see a happy ending. And the stories that we’ve come to see as unhappy ending tropes don’t end up that way.

Perhaps, though, the thing that made this book go from a fun, sexually empowering book, was how much it emphasizes and celebrates female friendship. Layla, Alex, Zoe, and Emma are tight, and even though there are realistic ups and downs in their relationships, they always come back to one another. There are boys (and a girl!) and there is sex, but there is not envy among them. They aren’t fighting for the same guys, and when they see a guy of interest being terrible, they tell their friends. They are not arguing over who gets what partner; they’re ensuring that the girls are finding the best, most respectful, most caring partners for them. Other girls who aren’t part of the core are rendered as important and fully-fleshed people worthy of respect as well. Though there is tension, the way that the girls describe other girls is done in a way that doesn’t demean or belittle them or call them any terribly sexist name in the book. In other words, it’s realistic that they don’t like every girl, but they don’t see the need to put that girl down using names or descriptions that belittle them.

Cherry is a fun read, and while it certainly tackles big, important topics, it’s refreshing in offering up a fun story about girls interested in and curious about sex. We regularly see this with males in YA fiction but rarely do we see it with girls. The cast of characters are all different, and they’re not all white, either — the book being set in Los Angeles feels authentic to the setting and to the demographics and to the sorts of relationships that would occur between teenagers there. The coming out scene with Emma is a small note in the story and it’s handled with care and love.

Though this will certainly see a fair amount of criticism — including this review by a male bookseller that I keep reading — it’s important to consider nuance. This is a book about girls who are curious about and who like sex. This is normal teenage girl behavior and thinking. The problem is that socially and culturally, we do not get to see or hear these stories. But we are allowed these same stories, often called “hilarious coming-of-age stories,” when they feature a male protagonist. Cherry absolutely tackles protection and pregnancy, and it absolutely talks about the fact not everyone is having sex. It also explores why and how people choose to engage in intercourse, and it discusses masturbation in a powerful, non-judgmental capacity. These are things we do not see in YA fiction.

I’ve spent a long time doing research on this and have written about it extensively on STACKED, as well as in the book The V-Word. The closest book to this one in recent memory is Julie Halpern’s The F-It List, which you may remember also caused some review controversy. While neither Halpern’s novel nor Rosin’s novel are perfect, both are doing something that needs to be considered thoughtfully and with extreme nuance. Rushing through books like this and announcing that they “don’t do” a thing or that they do a thing “too much” is denouncing the realities of female sexuality. No where does Rosin suggest all girls need to have sex and get it over. This is a story about four girls and their juggling of emotional, psychological, and physical desires in a world that constantly tells them to suppress those things while cheering on their male contemporaries for those very same things. Rosin tackles this, too, in the relationship between Layla and Logan.

Cherry is a necessary addition to the YA world, especially when it comes to fun fiction featuring a realistic female cast. Readers who love books by Amy Spalding will be delighted by this one, as will readers who are aching for a fun story ala movies like American Pie but with girls at the forefront.

It’s also a read for those eager for a solid story about friendship, girl gangs, and the power of female allies.

 

 

Cherry hits shelves August 16. Finished copy received from the publisher. 

 

Filed Under: sex, sex and sexuality, sexuality, ya, ya fiction, Young Adult, young adult fiction

Let’s Move Beyond the Gender Binary: Guest Post by I. W. Gregorio

December 5, 2014 |

Since gender has been a topic through some of the posts this week — and a topic we talk about frequently here at STACKED — let’s round out this week of contemporary YA with another post about gender. . . and about sex. Welcome to upcoming debut author I. W. Gregorio. 







I. W. Gregorio is a practicing surgeon by day, masked avenging YA writer by night. After getting her MD, she did her residency at Stanford, where she met the intersex patient who inspired her debut novel, None of the Above (Balzer & Bray / HarperCollins, 4/28/15). She is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books™ and serves as its VP of Development. A recovering ice hockey player, she lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two children. Find her online at www.iwgregorio.com, and on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram at @iwgregorio.












Anyone who’s ever walked down the aisles of a toy store knows that the gender binary is a monolith that is almost impossible to topple, and I admit freely to being someone who’s tried and failed. For the first two years of my daughter’s life, I clothed her preferentially in non-pink clothing. I gave away onesies and bibs that had the word “princess” on it (once, I even took scissors to cut them out). Instead of dolls, I got her Thomas the Tank Engine trains and Legos.

Then she started preschool, and she’s now a princess-loving, pink-wearing girlie girl who is begging for an American Girl doll for Christmas. Which is fine, except that I fear that her internalization of stereotyped “girliness” won’t stop at toys and clothes.


The gender binary is insidious, impacting our everyday lives in countless ways. I struggle against its restrictions every day in both of my professions. As a female surgeon, I encounter it when my colleague makes an offhand comment about how he prefers it when I don’t wear scrubs (as they’re “so unflattering”). As an author, I see it on the shelves: books are divided into “girl books” and “boy books.”


Binary thinking does harm to both women and men. The stereotype of women as submissive, nurturing caretakers has caused generations of girls to grow up thinking that to be assertive is to be bossy, and that their education and employment is less important than that of their male counterparts. Likewise, damage is done to men who go through life being called “sissies” for showing emotion, or daring to like musicals or art or literature. The gender binary also contributes to homophobia, by dictating who people “should” love, and transphobia, by failing to recognize that one’s biological sex doesn’t always correlate to gender identity.


The truth is that men should be allowed to wear pink, and women shouldn’t have to fear being labeled “butch” for wanting to play football. Pigeonholing certain traits as masculine or feminine is self-defeating, and prevents all of us from being our truest and best selves.


Some people defend the gender binary by saying that it’s based on biology. If gender stereotypes were restricted to the fact that men need jockstraps and women require bras, I’d be fine with that. But there is no biological reason, for example, why girls should prefer the color pink or books with skinny girls wearing dresses on the cover. Indeed, studies have shown that the presence of personality traits like assertiveness, empathy, and interest in science don’t significantly differ between men and women.


The dagger to the heart of the gender binary, however, is the fact that most men and women have physical traits specific to one sex only, but not all. There’s an exception to every rule, and in this case it’s the existence of intersex conditions in which people are born with sexual characteristics that are neither wholly male or wholly female (PSA: In the old days, people used the term “hermaphrodite,” which is inaccurate and considered offensive by most of the intersex community). For a great primer on intersex, please read this FAQ from the Intersex Society of North America.
For a long time, intersex has been invisible in popular culture because of the fear and stigma surrounding it (one exception is Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex). But things are changing – MTV recently revealed that one of its main characters is intersex, and just last week the press reported on an intersex woman with a connection to Michael Phelps. I have conflicting feelings about the press coverage of the Phelps case, for reasons well articulated here, but I am encouraged by the increased visibility of intersex and transgender people in the media overall.  


The gender binary isn’t going to disappear overnight. It can only be dismantled and undermined slowly, story by story. That’s where we have the responsibility as authors and readers to seek out literature that shows us that gender isn’t a binary – it’s a spectrum. Not everyone who is born with XX chromosomes is attracted to men, identifies as a woman, or has a uterus. To assume otherwise ignores the biological diversity of the human race.  


In an essay for PEN/American, I wrote that the first gay person I ever met was in a book (Mercedes Lackey’s Magic’s Pawn). The same is true for the first intersex person (Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex), and the first gender-fluid person (Kristin Elizabeth Clark’s Freakboy). I am so grateful to all of these books for opening my mind to the spectrum of gender identity and sexual orientation. But the binary-busting books don’t stop there – they include novels about girl football players, like Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s Dairy Queen, and picture books about little boys who love wearing dresses like Sara and Ian Hoffman’s Jacob’s New Dress.


To read about others is to know them. To know them is to expand your world. Here’s to reading books that show a world beyond the gender binary. Here’s to showing our kids that girls can have masculine traits and that boys can be feminine, too.

By the way: Recently my daughter started Tae Kwon Do lessons. Her favorite color is now black.  

Filed Under: contemporary week, contemporary week 2014, feminism, gender, Guest Post, intersex, sex, Uncategorized

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