Last Night at the Telegraph Club Winner of the National Book Award, Young People's Literature 2021

I found it refreshing to read a book that isn’t all smiles and rainbows. It was interesting but also hard to read about what it was like to be part of the LGBTQIA+ community in the 1950s. Lily faces the added ‘difficulty’ of being Chinese whilst the Cold War rages and America associates everything to do with China with the big bad enemy: communism. I enjoyed reading about Lily’s inner coming out, her love for Kath, and her external coming out (especially to her parents). The latter wasn’t pleasant, but the characters are so wonderfully written that every action they take makes sense, which is entertaining from a literary point of view, even though the homophobia she was subjected to made me sick. As the book is written from Lily’s perspective, we don’t get much insight into the other characters, but we see that every single one of them has their own burden to bear. What I also particularly liked were the historical facts at the end of the book, in which Malinda Lo gives us readers an insight into her research. The book combines young (lesbian) love with history. Lily and Kath’s story really tugs at your heartstrings and shows you the good fortune we have here in Switzerland almost 70 years later, even if we’re not yet at the point I personally would dream of. I won’t even get started on America and other countries. There’s still a long way to go. Last Night at the Telegraph Club is definitely a treasure among queer literature and has been sitting on my TBR pile for far too long.