For the fact was drugs were not necessary to most of us, because the music, youth, sweaty bodies were enough...We lived for music, we lived for Beauty, and we were poor. But we didn’t care where we were living, or what we had to do during the day to make it possible; eventually, if you waited long enough, you were finally standing before the mirror in that cheap room, looking at your face one last time, like an actor going onstage, before rushing out to walk in the door of that discotheque and see someone like Malone.” 


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Holleran's Dancer from the Dance is a story of gay culture in 1970s New York, an engaging satire and one of the most popular works of gay fiction of its time. 

I attended a fascinating conference over the weekend, hosted at Warwick University.  It was an interdisciplinary conference which drew on research from historians, literature buffs, academics studying film or television, people with a background in cultural studies and many others.  The conference 'Let's Hear it for the Girls' focused on Girlhood, Media and Popular Culture, 1990 - Present and explored, among other things, representations of contemporary girlhood.  The papers were a fascinating and eclectic mix, exploring contemporary girlhood against a historical backdrop, sexuality, class and politics (in the context of discourses on girlhood), postfeminist media culture, mediating the body – the fleshy and the digital, feminism and fandom, from riot grrrls to larry shippers and images of girlhood in popular culture. 

I was there to present my own paper on Young Adult fiction, looking at the LGBTQ representation in Young Adult fiction and focusing on a couple of books in particular to chart the changes over the decades - beginning with Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden and concluding with The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily Danforth and Keeping You a Secret by Julie Anne Peters.  I framed the discussion in the context of the quote from David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing:  "...just because it's better now, doesn't mean that it's always good" and I have since been pondering on my own paper and general discussions with other attendees which I wanted to touch upon in this post.

WARNING:  Please be aware that the story focuses on the aftermath of rape and rape culture and I have quoted excerpts from the book in the review. If you find the subject matter triggering, please do proceed with caution.

Courtney Summers sprung onto the YA scene less than ten years ago, with her first novel Cracked Up to Be.  All the Rage debuted in April 2015 and its release was marked by the #ToTheGirls campaign to support women on social media.  

​Summers employs first person narrative to tell the story of Romy Grey and with gritty realism, All the Rage grapples with rape culture, victim blaming and the skewed way in which society continues to deal with sexual violence against women.