Annie on My Mind

Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden

ISBN: 9780374404147
New York:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982

Plot - Annie Kenyon and Liza Winthrop, both 17, meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  Both are residents of the city, but from different walks of life.  Annie attends public school--Liza, a prestigious private school.  Where Annie has been freer, we find out, to discover and become herself, Liza has an image and a job to uphold, that of the Successful Student Body President Headed to MIT.  But what they soon discover as their friendship deepens into love is that they have much more in common than what comes between them.  Their love grows as they visit museums, the Botanical Gardens, enjoy a candlelit dinner together, and take in all that the city has to offer , until they are discovered by an employee of Liza's school while house-sitting at the house shared by two of Liza's teachers.  A rift develops between the girls and they go their separate ways--Annie to study music at Berkley, and Liza to MIT for architecture, just as they both had hoped.  The result is a time to heal and possibly come together through letters, which Liza is trying mightily to write as she narrates their story into this book.

Critical Evaluation -Like Daivd Levithan's Boy Meets Boy, this is a love story first and foremost.  It's a sweet and true tale assembled from whole-cloth characters and setting.  The tone is personal, as Liza narrates it as a college freshman, just as it should be.  Characters are thorough, primarily Liza and Annie, but their parents are also revealed from many sides.  The school administrators, the villains who drive the lovers apart in the almost-end, are somewhat flat, but in a way they have to be.  We're seeing them from Liza's perspective and they serve only one purpose in Garden's story.  New York is dazzlingly revealed to rival Paris as a city for lovers.  Whether or not this book's characters were lesbian or straight, it is a gentle love story in the greatest tradition.

Reader's annotation - Annie and Liza are happier together than each has ever been alone, until they are faced with the control that Liza's school determines it should have over her and that she should have over herself.  This is the story of their love, put to the test.

Information about the author - Traditional about-the-author information about Nancy Garden's career, including here having won the Margaret A. Edwards award for YA fiction in 2003, is easy to find at her website (http://www.nancygarden.com/).  On the page about her visits to schools, she also goes deeper.  For instance, she is has written books about bullying in the past, but is this year (2011) very concerned about cyberbullying.  In the wake of the firestorm of criticism, including book burnings, in reaction to Annie on My Mind, and to a lesser degree her nonfiction title, Witches, Garden continues to stay informed about censorship and intellectual freedom issues, and to address them in talks to children, young adults, and adults alike.
Genre - LGBTQ YA fiction, YA fiction
Curriculum Ties - Not a likely book for class study, unless as an example of traditional love story construction, or perhaps in an American Literature class reviewing contemporary history.
Booktalk ideas - 

1. Liza and Annie meet in a museum and end up wanting to spend more time together at a much deeper level than the powers-that-be at Liza's prep school think they should.  Liza's chances of attending MIT and becoming an architect hang in the balance, so she has to make a decision whether her love now or her future chances at happiness and fulfillment is worth sacrificing for the other.
2. Read the section where they first meet, beginning on page 8, "After a moment or two, the girl stopped singing..." and ending on page 9, "...I felt myself cringe at how dumb it sounded."  This meeting is so sweet and full of potential it speaks for itself.

Reading level -Young adult, although because issues of homosexuality are so much more openly dealt with today, if not openly enough yet, and the language and events are fairly chaste, in certain areas some younger readers will be ready for the story.  Indeed, Garden writes on her website that she wrote it for teens 12 and up.

Challenge issues - homosexuality

Challenge defense ideas:

• Librarian must read the book carefully and include it as a resource intended for older teens.
• Librarian greets students and regularly discusses their reading choices; she provides individualized, age-appropriate guidance in book choice.
• Explain the ways in which the librarian accompanies and guides younger students looking for books, and knows students well as individuals.

Why I included this book - This book is known as one of the "Best" as determined by ALA, YALSA, Booklist, and Booksellers' Choice.  It's a very important pick as a title in our collections of teenage love stories because the fact that it's about two girls certainly figures in strongly to the plot, as it must to be realistic even today, but it does not define the protagonists or their love.  The story is delightful and establishes a place for girls who fall in love in high school to find themselves in, as David Levithan puts it, our "representative" collections.