Review - "Pulp"

Pulp
by Robin Talley
rating: ☆☆
published: 13th December 2018
spoilers? yeah

Goodreads

I was really looking forward to Pulp. Historical books with LGBT characters, when they don't end in tragedy, are one of my favourite genres. And I had hopes that this one would fall into that category. Unfortunately, it turned out just not for me.

The story alternates between Janet in the 1950s, finding her first lesbian pulp fiction, and Abby in 2017, who embarks on a project for school about pulp fiction. Janet is in the throes of first love, while Abby is coping with breaking up with her first girlfriend and the falling apart of her parents' marriage.

One of the things I loved about this book was that it used the word "lesbian" a lot, and that's actually fairly uncommon in YA lit. Within the first chapter alone, it was used around ten times. Unfortunately, that kind of dropped off in favour of using qu--r (a word I'm not particularly fond of, but we'll get to that). However, it was really refreshing to see a character explicitly label themselves as a lesbian.

My favourite part of this book was the parts which discussed the LGBT community in the 1950s. LGBT history is not something I know a lot about, and it's something that's pretty much never taught, so that was really interesting. I almost wished the entire book was set in the historical context.

But, while I liked those aspects of the book, a lot of it really just bored me. It was a long book, and I wasn't actually that interested in Abby's part of the story - she seemed kind of like an overdramatic brat to me and I couldn't tell if that was there being too much of an age difference between me and her, or if she was genuinely an overdramatic brat. Possibly part of why I didn't like Abby's part was because of her insistence of using the word qu--r to describe characters in the 1950s. When qu--r was a slur even more so than it is now. I don't like applying that as a blanket term to anyone, let alone people who are (a) now dead, and (b) lived in a time when it came with such horrors. So the constant use of it in this book really put me off.

One last thing: I liked the twist at the end, because I was all prepared to be set up for Yet Another Tragic Ending (about halfway through it looked like that was going to happen). The problem was, I had been so bored by the book dragging up to that point, that I just wanted it to end.