Friday I'm In Love

YA romance

     Camryn Garrett fans, get ready to party.  After what feels like a too long wait the author of Full Disclosure and Off The Record has gifted us with Friday I'm In Love which totally lives up to its predecessors.

     "'But you said I could have one,' I say, folding my arms.  'Remember you said I could have a gigantic party when I turned sixteen because you never got to have one.'

     'When you were six,' Mom fires back.  'Things were different when you were six.'"

     As the narrative begins Mahalia's mother is driving her to her best friend's lavish Sweet Sixteen party.  It's a bittersweet moment.  At the same time she's celebrating Naomi's coming of age party she's mourning her inability to have one.

     "But it doesn't matter anymore.  It's too late for me to have a Sweet Sixteen and there's no such thing as a Sweet Seventeen.  The next-best big party to look forward to is, like, a wedding or funeral."

     The next week Mahalia and Naomi are at Naomi's house rewatching a movie where the character expresses frustration with gay people having to come out because otherwise they're assumed to be straight.  Mahalia says that people should be able to come out in any way they want to.  Personally she'd choose to come out in a big party, "Being the center of attention.  My sexuality being celebrated instead of shunted to the side where I can only talk about it with Naomi."

     That's when they come up with a coming out party idea.  But pulling it off isn't going to be easy or even guaranteed.

     While Naomi has two professional parents who can easily afford "two hundred dollars per hour and sixty-five dollars per plate" Mahalia's single mom struggles to make rent on their one bedroom apartment under ordinary circumstances.  And a double whammy crisis is about to strike.

     Mahalia's mother is the only family she can count on.  Her father is lost to a new wife and children.  Her mom is strongly fundamentalist Christian.  Will she be able to love a non hetero daughter?

     There is also a delightful but exasperating complication in Mahalia's personal life.  Siobhan is a gorgeous new student from Ireland.  Although Siobhan has a boyfriend she's sending signals that she may was to be willing to ditch him to become more than friends with Mahalia.

     Friday I'm In Love is a truly engaging narrative, especially for teens and adults who are encountering or have experienced roadblocks in pursuit of dreams.

     I never graduated high school.  Oh, yeah, I got a diploma but not the ceremony.  My last year in high school I went via the 20th century equivalent of zoom:  correspondence school.  Not by choice, I assure you.  Mom needed me to help my sister with her school work, be her TA and secretary, and do housework and cooking 🍳.   I very much missed a school social life, especially as ads for gifts for graduates popped up.  How I envied those who were able to experience this rite of passage.  When my diploma arrived in the mail I threw it in the trash.  It meant nothing to me.  When Harriet got to 🎓 it was torture, reminding me of what I missed out on.  When I graduated college I was one of the few people who had no family present.  But if all goes well (as in COVID not making a comeback) my grad school program will end with the graduation of my dreams with my family there and all the celebration and pomp and circumstance.

Jules Hathaway 

     

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