User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
hi as a 2019 San Francisco lesbian I'm here for the 1950s San Francisco gays
Rating: really liked it
↠ 5 starsA historical fiction set in 1950's San Francisco, focusing on lesbian culture and the coming of age of a Chinese American? More of this please. In an era brimming with disruption and upheaval, the neon lights of a lesbian bar known as the Telegraph Club offer sanctuary to those in need of it. To a young girl questioning her identity, the dark nights and lively shows beckon her, bringing with them perhaps the very answers she’s been looking for. To do so, she’ll enlist the help of an unlikely friend and together they will go forth, unlocking the very secrets that the club has to offer them.
This is a perfect storm of a novel. A book that broke me down almost as many times as it lifted me up. The descriptive narrative, reminiscent of other historical fiction I have read in the past and enjoyed, led me gently into its waters, before quickly amping up the drama. In this incredible story, Malinda Lo gives reference to an era not long past, and the lives of those that have been swept beneath the carpet of history. The central focus on the historical events of the time period, specifically the red scare and the bar raids of the 1950’s, were both well researched and thoroughly examined in their exposition. At its heart, Last Night at the Telegraph Club explores the challenging conditions associated with the era, yet manages to imbue a sense of warmth and belonging in every aspect of the novel. A feeling that remains constant, even during some of the darker moments of the narrative. One of the more compelling points throughout though is the main character's journey towards discovering her queer identity and the coming into her identity as a Chinese American. Especially as this was a time in America when neither were tolerated. Enter into all of this the exploration of the lesbian bar scene, which was just everything to me. I absolutely loved how it tied together with self discovery and a love realization. There was something so wholesome in Lily finding out that love had been by her side all along. It made my heart happy. Basically I adored everything about this, and can I just say, found lesbian family is superior to every other trope out there? I’m seriously expecting more of this in the future. Give the people what they want. I don't really have anything more to say except that this book means so much to me, and i'll be thinking about its ending until the end of time. I’m only just realizing how much I love bittersweet endings and books that leave things open ended, which this does beautifully. For those of you seeking a book that will leave an impact, look no further. Last Night at the Telegraph club is a book for those constantly in search of something, whose lonely hearts demand they answer its call.
Trigger warnings: parental abuse, sexism, misogyny, racism, racial slurs, deportation, death of a loved one, homophobia, internalized homophobia, miscarriage.
Rating: really liked it
I try to read basically everything.
I am a book nerd in a way that is all-encompassing, not limited to any genre or niche but instead poisoning every category of literature (as well as books that could never be called literature even if you were being nice) in order to be absolutely as annoying as possible to both everyone I know in real life and everyone on this website.
That being said:
1) I have read less young adult stuff this year than ever in my life, and
2) recently I have decided to all but give up on historical fiction.
I can explain both, as I'm sure you are relieved to know.
YES! you shout in the privacy of your own home.
Another review from emma with an unnecessarily high word count!I know. I'm excited too.
I read less and less YA because I am both legally and technically (and in no other ways) an adult now. I pay an electric bill sometimes, when my roommate Venmo charges me. I pay rent all the time. I am 23 years old physically, even as I vary between 12 and 74 emotionally.
Because I am a grumpy elderly person I get mad at teens. So when I read books about teens I get mad at the books. So it seems better for us all if I just stick to my General Fiction section where I am welcome in my curmudgeonliness.
The historical fiction part is because I cannot f*cking stand when modern writes write old-timey. I mentioned this in a wildly ranty review recently. I can't remember which. But if you're feeling like I'm repeating myself, a) you're right and b) get used to it because I am REALLY running out of review ideas.
Anyway.
All of this is to say that this is YA historical fiction and therefore everything in me advised against reading it and yet I liked it so much.
Very lovable characters. Very sweet romance. Very interesting and believable setting. It was good stuff.
I can't believe I read a million-page-long young adult historical and liked it to this extent. Thank you as always for knowing me and my reading taste better than I know myself, s.penkevich.
Bottom line: What a pleasant surprise, for once!
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pre-reviewhm okay so this is everything.
review to come / 4 stars
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upon further reflection, i'm stealing lily's idea and reading only books by asian authors this month!
book 1: the incendiaries
book 2: last night at the telegraph club
Rating: really liked it
too many flashbacks to straight people
Rating: really liked it
The cover of this book is absolutely stunning, but the actual story didn't have the same impact that the cover did. While I found the picture of life for a Chinese American girl in 1950s San Francisco fascinating, the story seemed to move at a snail like pace.
I enjoyed Lily and Kath's relationship, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I found the Telegraph Club, it's performers and patrons more interesting. Thinking back on it, I can't really say who Kath was, she was very generic and aside from liking planes, was almost a dreamgirl-lesbian character designed to fit Lily perfectly.
The ending of the book, and Lily's life after a major event, should have been a good chunk of the book I felt, not relegated to a discussion in the epilogue. The story doesn't really get interesting until the last 30%, so if the first 70% was cut down to expand the more interesting events, this could have been a 4 or 5 star read.
Rating: really liked it
i absolutely adored this book!!
last night at the telegraph club is probably the most engaging and vivid historical novel i've read thus far. it feels firmly rooted in 1950s san francisco, where 17-year-old chinese american lily lives and has her sapphic awakening.
it's about a lot of things: dreaming about outer space & things bigger than your world, tender first love, close family bonds & conflict, childhood friendships that eventually run their course, foggy san francisco, growing up in chinatown during the red scare, and the sobering realization that you are not the nice straight kid that everyone expects you to be. but most of all, this is a novel about the need for representation.
at the start of the book, lily is absolutely ravenous for sapphic representation. this is something that she doesn't even have the words for; she just knows that she is
different in some way. she has a desperate need to see this otherness in people around her, lest be swallowed by confusion and isolation.
She couldn't put into words why she had gathered these photos together, but she could feel it in her bones: a hot and restless urge to look - and, by looking, to know.
&
She still liked to look, to feel the way it tugged at something deep within her. A spark of recognition, or a glow of hope.
unbelievably troubling to grow up and find lgbt+ representation only in ads for male impersonators at nightclubs, or in tawdry pulp novels with tragic endings.
when lily does finally discover the world of the telegraph club and its small community women who love women, it's a shock to her system. less shocking is the fact that she is usually the only asian american woman in this lesbian space. even so, finding representation via community is a powerful thing:
She realized, with a jolt, that the city must be peppered with women who frequented the Telegraph or similar clubs; women who watched performers like Tommy Andrews, made friends with each other, made girlfriends with each other. At each intersection she cast skittish glances at the women waiting for the light to change, wondering if she was one of them too, or her, or her.
the book is full of vivid, cinematic imagery, and feels wonderfully historical. so many places and streets are identified by name, and i'm sure i'd enjoy it even more if i was familiar with san francisco's geography.
and it took me a while to fully engage, but after the halfway mark, i absolutely devoured the story.
lily and kath's romance is soft and tender, and feels realistic for tentative teenagers trying to figure things out. i wish their relationship could be explored in more depth, but i still adore their sweetness.
i also adore lily as a character. she's thoughtful and introspective, and such a sweet balance of naive and courageous. i find it really fascinating that she is forced to have a "coming out" conversations of sorts, with both her childhood friend and her mother, despite the lack of cultural precedent for coming out. obviously they use different language than we have today, and much is left unsaid. but for lily, coming out means speaking her truth, and being loyal to herself and to her love with kath.
my only critique would be about the flashback chapters from lily's relatives' POVs, which close each of the book's six parts. these are interesting for providing additional characterization and broader cultural context, but i think they really break the flow and momentum of lily's story. also, they're each accompanied with a timeline of historical events and significant events in lily's family. good background, but the timelines overlap with each other from chapter to chapter, and i found it really confusing to see them piece by piece like this.
i'm so glad malinda lo wrote this book. not only did lily's story come alive for me, but i learned a lot from lo's long and informative author's note. she fills in some extra historical context for the impeccably well-researched story, and cements it as a representation novel.
last night at the telegraph club both portrays a character in dire need of cultural representation for people like her, "learning how to live as both chinese american and lesbian in spaces that often did not allow both to coexist," and provides representation for readers today. so much love!!!
Rating: really liked it
4.50 Stars. Now I know why this book had a lot of hype surrounding it. It was excellent and I’m glad I got to read it before the year ended. I have read quite a few of Lo’s books, but it has been around 9 years since I have read any of them. I was very interested to see how she has evolved as an author and all I can say is wow. This felt like a huge step-up from her earlier books and it was really cool to see the author she has become.
I don’t know what happened but I had no idea what this book was really about. For some reason I thought it was a cozy-like mystery with some humor. I don’t know if it was the cover or reading reviews wrong, but I screwed this one up. Instead, this is a story about a young Asian-American woman growing up in the 50’s while coming to terms with her sexuality. Asian rep is so lacking in mid-century historic-fiction that I’m struggling to even name another book I could loosely compare this one too. Anyway, this just felt so well done and while it was fiction, Lo did her research. I would implore people to read her history notes in the back of the book. They were a fascinating read and contained some information I never knew and probably never would have known.
I do have to give a big tissue warning. I lost track but I think it was the last 20% of the book that I almost went through a whole box of tissues. There were times this book slowed-down a bit, and I felt like there was some info that was not needed, but when the book picked back up, it delivered a big emotional gut punch (in the best reading way).
TLDR: The hype around this book is real and this was an excellent historic-fiction, sapphic, YA book. If not for a few parts I didn’t think were necessary to the story, and a few character updates that were unfortunately missing, this would have been an easy full 5 star book for me. As it stands it is still one of the better books I’ve read in 2021, and I’m very impressed with Lo’s growth as an author. This is an easy one to recommend to YA fans.
Rating: really liked it
I loved this!! it was so interesting getting to read about history that has largely been left unexplored or supressed and the intersection of being Chinese-American in the USA at the time of the Red Scare, as well as a young woman interested in STEM and a lesbian exploring the lesbian bar scene.
I really enjoyed Lily as a character and reading from her perspective. She was really easy to empathise with and understand and I loved the journey she went on as she realised this new part of her identity and what that would mean for her. I also just adored her relationship with Kath and all of the scenes at the Telegraph Club and exploring this environment! Definitely going to be checking out some of the resources in the bibliography because I really want to learn more!
My only issue is that I don't think Malinda Lo's writing works for me :// However, the writing in LNATTC was definitely preferable to her earlier work that I've read and I'll be looking out for her future works!
Rating: really liked it
this is perhaps one of the most interesting and informative books i've ever read. the historical and cultural parts were
everything my gay history heart could hope for and more. malinda lo transports you to a whole different place and time, and it felt so vivid; i could literally picture everything, as if i was, indeed,
right there!
the thing, though, is that i expected to feel this sort of things-not for the background, but for the characters and their relationships. i definitely rooted for lily and kath, there's no way to deny that because i really did hope they would find their way together, but...
i didn't care that much on the other hand? like, it's hard to describe because i wanted it for
them, but i, for a few reasons, couldn't really feel invested.
the writing is perfect for the culture and history. it just fits, as if malinda lo was made to write this, but it was also distant. some part of me thinks the author did this on purpose to really show the "vibe" of the story, of the time. but it really brought down how invested i was in the story and the way i felt for the characters.
overall, the
story didn't feel too memorable for me. the things behind it (historical and cultural aspects) did. they stood out to me. but for a fiction book, that's not enough for me. i read to learn, but i also read to feel. and this book, no matter how bad i wanted it to make me feel things (from hope to fear to sadness to every other emotion), didn't deliver that.
Rating: really liked it
l 76% l this book is basically a taste of what life would be like for a gay chinese-american teenager in 1950s san francisco.
in two words: it’s rough.
the whole book doesn’t focus on how difficult things were, it rather slowly builds and conveys all of the emotions that our main character feels as she discovers herself and who she loves, and then it slaps us in the face with reality.
the majority of this book is slow, and most of it focuses on the thoughts of the main character and the time and place. the setting is written so expertly, i loved all of the descriptions of san francisco during that time, i could imagine everything perfectly and i could almost feel myself there on a windy and foggy day with lily and shirley, watching the ocean. my favorite part about this book was honestly just how the place and time were written, i really felt as if i were experiencing it firsthand and honestly this is one of the big reasons why i read historical fiction.
i also loved how the author included chinese culture in the story, it provided some extra depth as well as diversity.
near the end of the book, things get much more tense and let’s just say some shit goes down. i thought it was a very realistic portrayal of what life was like back then and how people thought, and it very well could’ve been someone’s exact experience during that time. it was hard to read about though and some of the scenes honestly made me feel sick. i really felt for the characters who had to go through that and all of the real people who had to go through things like that and worse.
plot:this follows lily, a chinese-american girl, who discovers her identity and the telegraph club while trying to navigate school and her life in general, all during a dangerous time where her family may be exported from the country.
i’m pretty sure this is YA, so it isn’t written in a way that is very intense or has violence or anything, but i really did feel the struggles of the main character during a time that was so difficult.
during the first 75% of the book, things move really slowly and nothing bad really happens, and it isn’t until near the end when things start to go downhill and we see how bad things could get. this story is definitely slow-paced, and it isn’t action packed or anything, it mainly just focuses on the setting and normal events that can happen during one’s life.
the book also includes things that aren’t wholly necessary to the development of the plot, but all in all has a positive contribution to the story and provides more details to the setting and characters.
lily for the most part has a pretty mundane life, and then everything begins to change when she discovers kath and the telegraph club. i enjoyed reading her journey.
the characters:lily: i think this probably just has to do with the time period, but lily was really naive and it annoyed me a lot at points. i think i would’ve enjoyed this more if the main character would’ve been more interesting, but lily just felt really boring and flat. she had no other personality traits besides being ‘a good chinese girl’ and timid and secretly a lesbian. i would’ve liked to know what personality traits she had, was she funny what things did she like etc etc. i feel like i never really got to know her besides something you could read on the back cover of a book. •shy chinese girl who wants to be good figures out that she is a lesbian and wants to go to a lesbian bar but is afraid and is torn between how she feels inside and what she ‘should’ be.• that’s it, that’s all she is. she had some good character development, but definitely just the expected kind a character like that would have. i didn’t necessarily dislike her and she worked well with the story, but she just made the whole thing seem more juvenile somehow and that was slightly annoying.
kath: if there’s going to be a sequel, i think it should definitely be from oath’s pov, because we never get to know her at all in this book. we get to know random side characters better than we get to know kath. i have absolutely no idea what she’s like. it’s like lily wanted to keep her all to herself so she didn’t share her with us (and i don’t really mind that if that’s the case.) we only get kath from lily’s pov, and it seems like lily is too wrapped up in her own head to be able to tell us anything about kath and therefore it just makes kath a very underdeveloped character.
shirley: for whatever reason, shirley felt like the most complicated character. i definitely judged her multiple times and then she would do things that would make me change my mind about her and then i would keep changing my mind because i could never really figure her out. i definitely disliked her most of the time, but i appreciated that she was more complicated than just a cardboard cutout of a ‘mean popular girl’ type character. she seems like she could be a real, complicated person. i disliked her a lot from where the story left off, but if there were to be a sequel i don’t think she would be irredeemable.
the romance:i think the point of this book was more to show what loving someone of the same gender was like during that time than the actual relationship between lily and kath.
i believed that lily and kath felt things for each other, but i didn’t feel like i really got to experience it firsthand and there wasn’t much development of the relationship itself from the readers perspective. most of their relationship seemed to happen inside lily’s head as she discovered her feelings, but not much seemed to really happen between lily and kath. which is probably realistic in real life, but not how it usually happens in books.
it was refreshing but at the same time made it so that there wasn’t really any chemistry or tension between lily and kath and i wasn’t waiting for them to get together or anything like that.
they were also pretty young, so maybe that played a part, and they seemed more concerned about being gay and what that meant than worrying about whether the other person liked them back.
writing:the writing was good; it wasn’t significantly special and i’m not likely to quote it or anything but it did an amazing job of portraying the setting and had good descriptions of literally anything that happened in the story, down to dissecting the ice cream flavors.
it was great at immersing the reader in the story and made me feel as if i were actually there. it uses a lot of smells and sights to describe the surroundings, which provided for very detailed mental images and a presence in the story.
10/10 sensory language
wrap-up:overall this is a good book and it’s 100% here for the gays <3
it feels a bit juvenile and times and moves slowly but makes up for it with the atmospheric tones and story development overall.
it also gives me such nostalgia for san francisco in the 1950s although i would decidedly
not want to be there
________________________
4 stars
rep:✔︎ chinese-american lesbian mc
✔︎ italian-american lesbian li
✔︎ sapphic relationship
✔︎ chinese-american sc(s)
✔︎ queer sc(s)
tw for parental abuse, homophobia, racism (microagressions,) etc
Rating: really liked it
MALINDA LO AND QUEER CHINESE HISTORICAL FICTION???
I'M HERE FOR THIS.
Rating: really liked it
I understand how meaningful this will likely be for some people, but it bored me. I typically read my Kindle in bed, and I would find one of two things happening with this book: either it would immediately make me sleepy, so I wouldn't read much; or I would read for what felt like hours and notice that I was barely making any progress.
Seriously, almost nothing happens. There are many dangling threads and big ideas, but there is almost no plot. The only major plot development happens about 3/4 of the way through, so that last quarter of the book is interesting. But the rest is so, so dull.
I'm going to put the stuff that really annoyed me behind a tag.
(view spoiler)
[1. The constant threat of Lily's family being deported for Communism goes nowhere. Her father gets his papers taken early in the novel, but the only way it ends up playing into the story is that it's a factor in her parents' decision to send her off to live with her aunt. The FBI or whoever never show up; there is no dramatic event regarding the threat of Communism.
2. Speaking of, several characters are introduced early on before we are told they are part of a youth Communist group. We never see most of them again. One makes a brief appearance much later when we find out he's dating Lily's friend Shirley, but again... there is no scene or event that dictates them needing to be there at the novel's start.
3. Kath gets arrested at the Telegraph Club and we just never find out what happens to her. When she reappears for the epilogue, there is no discussion about what happened that night, where she went, or what she's been up to for the year in between the arrest and the reunion.
4. And while we never find out what happens to Kath during her arrest, we do get endless scenes of Shirley trying on dresses and competing for Miss Chinatown, even though she and Lily fall out the day of so we never get to see the contest. There's also a really long sequence of Lily and Shirley going to a museum and looking at the seals and eating lunch and MY GOD get on with it already! (This is how I felt about quite a few sections of this book.)
5. There are chapters at the end of each part with flashbacks to Lily's parents and aunt, and they are an utter waste of time. The chapters from her aunt's perspective, I suppose, added context to her decision to take Lily in late in the book, but did we really need a chapter about her parents going on a date? (hide spoiler)]
Rating: really liked it
✨🌃🛩🪐
" An unfamiliar emotion swelled inside her at this image. A strangely sharp pang for a place she had never visited. For a people she resembled but did not know.”1950s Chinatown. Sapphic. Women in STEM.Girl who wants to make planes meets girl who wants to fly. It's perfection, really. I don’t make the rules 🤷♀️
Taking place in 1950s Chinatown in San Fransisco, our main character Lily Hu, is a Chinese American who starts to ask herself some questions: what does she want to be when she grows up, and
who she wants to be with. 👀
"That book, it was about two women, and they fell in love with each other.
Have you ever heard of such a thing?"
Lily's classmate, Kath, takes them to
The Telegraph Club; a lesbian bar--in secret. Along with the problems of falling in love with a woman, deportation threatens her family amidst the Red-Scare paranoia.
At first, the writing was a bit difficult to keep me reading. The writing itself and the book itself is objectively good, but at times I found myself disinterested. The story isn't fast-paced or action-filled, or plot-heavy, but it's not about that.
The main thing this book did finely on was its beautiful depiction of youthful desire, first love, and Chinese American culture.It was
incredibly detailed with the occasional flowery prose, (my fave). From the
1950s environment to the emotions of the characters, to, of course, the food!😩
"Those strange women at the party seemed to see her much more clearly than she saw herself, and it was disorienting-as if her body were not her own, but capable of acting without the conscious direction of her mind, which was screaming at her to let go of Kath's hand, to go home as fast as she could, to crawl into her bed and pull the covers over her head and forget about this entire night, to forget about Tommy Andrews and the Telegraph club and all those women who looked at her and saw that she and Kath were...what?"
Rating: really liked it
i tried to write a review for this book when i first read it back in august, and have attempted to write several since then and,,put it off but now i’ve finished reading it for a second time i have no excuses left to put off writing a review for this
so, first of all, if i were to try and rate this objectively it probably wouldn’t be a 5 star read. there’s definitely a lot of loose ends in this book, plot points that are very briefly touched on and then not spoken of again throughout the book. i feel like this would bother a lot of people so do be wary of that!! for me, though, this book was so special and important to me that i overlooked that
i also think the reason i love this book so so much is because of the point in my life that i read this. as someone who spends uhhh half my life doubting my sexuality (because, like, comp het) this book that exuded lesbian culture? was everything to me
like, as someone who spent a large half of the beginning of this year doubting my lack of attraction in men (because, i would like to repeat: comp het) i can clearly sense that since i first read this book at the start of august that has...actually stopped?? quite a lot?? because it’s made me feel a little (or a lot) less scared about being a lesbian??
it’s very hard to explain this without making it seem like i’m making an overly big deal of a book but!! this story really had a huge impact on me OK
i loved the characters in this as well!! i can’t quite explain how much but!! i would like to meet them all pls
i’m also kind of obsessed with books set in the early to mid twentieth century so like?? that with LESBIANS?? oh also the author’s note made me cry hahahaha i am fine
also i love the ‘going to a bookshop after school each day to read a bit more of that one queer book they have because i can’t actually take it home’ thing because . 13 year old me says hi!!!!
oh and how do i forget to mention the romance!! i loved it!!! honestly it was quite a small part of the book until very much towards the end??? BUT it was very gay and i loved it very much and i love lily and kath best lesbians
the one thing i’ll mention that bothered me very slightly about this book is that despite it being so specifically about lesbian culture this book falls into the trap of a main character who is clearly written as a lesbian but!! never actually uses the word lesbian to describe herself. this didn’t make me like the book any less, because it is so so common but just wanted to mention this!!!
anyway!! i love this book more than i can possibly say and i’m going to be reading it for the third time as soon as my copy arrives (hurry up pls @ the shop i ordered it from) and then probably make this review much, much longer when i think of even more things i adore about this book
(what if i just,, listen to a chapter of the audiobook every night before i sleep,,that would be,,a very good idea)
(also: me at the start of this review “right time to write a proper, serious review for the fave book’
the review “lesbians!!!!!!!! i love them!!!!!!! gay” )
Rating: really liked it
This novel follows seventeen-year-old Lily Hu, a young Chinese American teenager coming to terms with her queerness in 1954 San Francisco. I liked how Malinda Lo wrote about the racism Lily experienced in her newfound, predominantly white queer community, as well as the homophobia she faced from her Chinese family and friends. Lily’s coming to terms with her queerness – the fear, the longing, the search for understanding and connection – all felt real and honest. Lo incorporates some interesting scenes pertaining to xenophobia and anti-communism that help ground the novel in its time period and add nuance to Lily’s experience as well as those of her family.
My main disappointment from this novel comes from how I felt the Chinese American characters came across as underdeveloped. For example, Lo includes a riveting flashback scene from the perspective of Lily’s mom, Grace, though she never revisits that and by the end of the book Grace and Lily’s relationship feels underdeveloped and unfinished. Similarly, Lo drops hints that Lily’s best friend, Shirley, has some nuanced family conflict and a potentially intriguing romantic relationship, though those elements of Shirley’s character never come to fruition. It felt like Lo focused on Lily’s relationship with her white love interest Kath, which is whatever, though I wish that focus did not come at the expense of other elements of Lily’s life. Also, I feel like white queer love interests are overrepresented in queer literature, so I hope that future books can include romances and friendships between queer people of color.
