Hayley Kiyoko

Trigger Warnings: mentions of suicide, grief, loss of a parent, homophobia, underage drinking and drug use

It’s the summer of 2006 and 17-year-old Coley has been forced to move to rural Oregon after losing her mother. She’s in no position to risk her already fragile heart - but then she meets Sonya, and everything she’s tried to keep down goes flying. Both girls have a lot to figure out and realize before they can step up.

Based on Hayley Kiyoko’s hit song and music video with the same title, Girls Like Girls is about young, queer love between two girls.

The writing of this isn’t perfect, I didn’t think it would be, especially being Hayley Kiyoko’s debut novel, but it made up for it in the parts that really hit it home. Sure some parts were a bit cringey and filled with teenage dramatics, but it was also very lyrical and still realistic in parts.

Though, Tenton drove me so nuts! I understand in a way that it’s set in a small town and you don’t always have a wide selection of people to hang out with but like - come on! Sonya would continuously defend him but we never saw anything good from him.

Overall, this is a cutesy YA sapphic romance that gives a bit of a “cinematic extension” to Kiyoko’s song and music video with the same title. Don’t hold it up to high standards of regular romance, it is Young Adult - other than that, I can see quite a few people enjoying the read.… (mehr)

A pretty accurate story about teen girls in the time period its set in! It's interesting that the same qualities that made the song and music video so excellent make this novelization a little bit of a slog—the universality of the feelings expressed in those translate to a novel that's full of a lot of trite clichés. I also wish we'd got more epilogue! I know that's a bit "The meal was terrible and there was so little of it!", so obviously the cliches (Seriously, while feeling low, both the girls get haircuts and one cuts her own hair as an expression of her feelings) didn't hinder my experience that much.… (mehr)