Orpheus Girl

August 15, 2019
Teen lesbians fight for acceptance in a small town. In her debut novel, award-winning poet Rebele-Henry (Autobiography of a Wound, 2018, etc.) gives the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice a modern twist, situating the timeless tale of forbidden heterosexual love in present-day rural Texas. The protagonists are best friends fated with the misfortune of being raised in a place where being gay is "considered more offensive than any other sin." Growing up poor, scarred by a birth defect, and raised by her widowed grandmother, who's always resented that her daughter left her with a 2-year-old, 16-year-old Raya's "obsessing over staying invisible" is only compounded when she realizes she's gay and that her attraction for her best friend, Sarah, a preacher's daughter, is requited. After the true nature of their relationship is painfully made public, the teens' conservative families send them away for religious conversion therapy designed to "cure" their gayness. At the remote, prisonlike facility, Raya and Sarah band with other banished queer youths as they are subjected to hard labor and horrifying, identity-erasing treatments. Once desperate for acceptance of their sexual orientation, Raya and company now find themselves fighting for their lives. What the plot-propelled narrative lacks in thematic nuance it makes up for with probing character development, offering readers harrowing lessons in self-reliance. Characters default to white. A bold, graphic tale about the costs of exclusion. (index of characters) (Fiction. 13-18)

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September 1, 2019

Gr 9 Up-Two lesbians in rural Texas suffer physical and psychological torture in this reimagining of the Orpheus legend. Raised in a conservative small town where gossip becomes myth, Raya has never felt like the other girls. She keeps her real self hidden, knowing that gay kids in her town disappear and become cautionary tales. When Raya and her best friend Sarah, a preacher's daughter, are caught in bed together, they are sent to Friendly Saviors conversion camp to"get fixed." Like Orpheus, Raya is determined to save the girl she loves, even if that means going through hell. But her resolve to escape quickly turns to resignation as she undergoes a brutal regime of labor, prayer, exercise, and, eventually, electric shock treatments. The so-called therapies at Friendly Saviors are staggeringly painful to endure and to read about. Horrific, graphic scenes of electroshock treatment as well as homophobic slurs, transphobia, suicide, and more may be triggering for some readers. Deeply emotional, this devastating story is lyrical and haunting, though repetition and heavy-handed reminders of the Orpheus story distract from the power and immediacy of Raya's narrative. Underdeveloped secondary characters align with other mythological figures but do little to move the story along. This unremittingly bleak depiction of what it means to be anything other than cisgender and heterosexual is heartbreaking; isolated Raya has no examples of queer happiness or survival. VERDICT A secondary purchase for libraries with large LGBTQIA+ YA collections that also offer more nuanced and positive looks at what it means to be gay.-Amanda MacGregor, Parkview Elementary School, Rosemount, MN

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