I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

⭐⭐⭐⭐

So, I Kissed Shara Wheeler is not my favorite Casey book- I think that would be One Last Stop, the new adult genre is just really fun, and I love how Casey's writing lends itself to the passionate, fragile first queer adult relationships. There's obviously so much love here for queer Southern teens though, and it was a really heartwarming read. Starting the book, as someone who used to be a John Green fan the bisexual paper towns vibes just kind of violently threw itself at me, where it's hard to tell who Shara is because of the cult of Christian white girl purity around her and focuses on the (albeit lovely) group of misfits who gather around that personality cult to follow her clues to find her and obscure the actual person behind it. This is the same deal as John Green where it's kind of messily telling this same kind of story with the hope of kind of dismantling the trope, but I feel like as I learn a little bit more about white womanhood and intersectional feminism it just. Really makes sense that we have this whole genre around people's obsession with finding these white women who represent so much for the people looking for them about innocence and purity culture, while women of color are usually the missing persons in reality and little attention is really given to them. I'm clearly not a super educated source on this and I would recommend looking at projects like www.csvanw.org/mmiw/ for more info.

IKSW is third person narrated by Chole Green, a bisexual overachiever and dress-code resister with two moms. She grew up in LA going to "hippie schools" where she was restless under the lack of academic pressure, and her moms needed to move back to their hometown in Alabama for work, leaving Chole to choose to go to Willowgrove Christian prep. This sparks concern from her mother, who attended the school decades ago and was the first, only, and legendary student to come out as a lesbian at Willowgrove. IKSW has a lot of interesting convos about being queer in the south, from her moms to her friends, showing up where Chole least expects it. Chole is clearly an unreliable narrator at points, and we see her undervaluing her friendships and not understanding how her guarded dismissal of the south as a queer person who grew up in LA ends up also effecting those queer Southerners that she loves.

Chole's obsession with Shara's disappearence is explained by her to be about needing to win valedictorian and prove that she's better than Shara (the golden girl and principal's daughter at Willowgrove) once and for all. The explanation is something that even Chole has trouble believing, but it's repeated often as something that Chole uses to define herself and Shara, who she sees as her only worthy opponent at the school. Something that always kind of jars me in Casey McQuiston books is how they deal with intelligence and kind of equate it with attractiveness. I'm not sure, it feels like a meritocracy thing? I just remember really clearly in RWRB when Alex says that he's always found "competency" to be really hot. I'm not sure why this hits me the wrong way, except that maybe I'm neurodivergent, but there are also characters who are neurodivergent in the books most specifically in IKSW, although their identities never come with any serious reckoning with the kind of cutthroat intelligence culture that stars in this novel, and even shows up in the political fire in RWRB and a bit of August's kid detective observation skills that make Jane fall for her harder in OLS.

In IKSW, Rory, one of the boys on the wild-Shara chase with Chole, has dyslexia- something that Chole seems to figure out first? It's mentioned how Rory is judged by their teachers and Chole has a brief moment where she recognizes that his previous dismissal of the ACT wasn't quite the rich kid powerplay she thought it was. This book deals with a lot, but I think I wanted a moment where Chole is confronted with how awful academia can be, specifically in private schools which for one, aren't regulated to support accomodations for neurodivergent and disabled students. And like, I could go on about how I hate the College Board and how segregated AP classes are and how it's for-profit, and how as a public school kid I kind of raise my hackles at this kind of blind faith that this one learning method where you have to pay exorbitant tuition fees is the best.

It's clear that Chole is unreliable though, and her ends-justify-means strategy get her into trouble later, where she has to confront how she's taken her friends for granted, especially Georgia, who is my favorite bookstore lesbian in the world. I loved the attention to side characters, and the little epistolary glimpses we got into other characters lives. I especially loved seeing a side character questioning their gender in this really real and fragile and sweet way that I really don't think I've ever seen represented before. Stories about questioning gender!! From jocks who the main character originally doesn't get! That character also falls into the trope where 2 sides of the love triangle think that they’re jealous but are actually in love with each other, and god. ("Can I listen to your songs?" "Only if you're okay with them all being about you." JUST. COME ON. Casey McQuiston has done it again with the romantic lines "i want you" "then fucking have me" from RWRB levels it's fine.)

Overall, did I have personal things that I wanted to be addressed? Yes. But I think the more of an author's work you read the more you understand what works for you in their style and what doesn't, and that's what happened to me with IKSW. This book tackles a lot for a YA debut, and I still honestly flew through it and had a lot of fun. As always, I can't wait to see what McQuiston does next.