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Book Reviewed by:Acclaimed author of Ash Malinda Lo returns with her most personal and ambitious novel yet, a gripping story of love and duty set in San Francisco's Chinatown during the 1950s.
"That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other." And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: "Have you ever heard of such a thing?"
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.
America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father--despite his hard-won citizenship--Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.
National Book Awards
2021
Lo's extensive research makes this a YA novel with real historical teeth, grounded in the time period, geography, culture and history it is representing, offering a new window into an underrepresented intersection of identities. She does not sugarcoat reality, but still leaves readers with a sense of hope and appreciation for the power of young love and the true freedom of knowing oneself. Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a powerful coming-of-age story that expands on hidden histories of a particular period of the United States from several angles, in beautiful, moving prose...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Michelle Anya Anjirbag).
In Last Night at the Telegraph Club, some of the pressure that Lily faces in her family life is related to their precarious situation as immigrants, specifically as Chinese immigrants in the aftermath of the anti-communist hysteria of McCarthyism. Chinese immigrants have a long, often obscured history in the United States, which includes several exclusion acts that were essentially part of a strategy to keep U.S. immigration, and the country's citizenry, of white, European descent. Despite the gradual repeal of these measures, Sinophobia, or Anti-Chinese sentiment and racism, was prevalent in the U.S. at the time the book is set, and it still persists today, as has been made more openly apparent by some of the national discourse during the ...
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Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
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Emily X.R. Pan, New York Times bestselling author of The Astonishing Color of After
Exquisite and heart-shattering, Last Night at the Telegraph Club made me ache with wishing. This book is for anyone who has ever loved—in any sense of the word.
