Annie on my Mind

Garden, N. (1992). Annie on my mind (Aerial ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Liza and Annie are both 17 years old. Liza attends a private school, which she is school president at and wants to go to MIT.  Annie loves music and loves to sing.  They meet the Metropolitian Museum in New York. There they develop an attraction for each other.  As time goes by, they fall in love.  Liz and Annie hide their feelings away from everyone around them.  One Christmas, they give each other gold rings as gifts.  They both shy away when one tries to touch the other one, which leads to an argument, and  they agree to stop running away from each’s other feelings. One day, Liza’s teachers, Ms. Widmer and Ms. Stevenson, asked her to watch their cats while they are out of town.   They decide to spend some private time together.  There they discover that their teachers are gay too. They decide to take it to the next level.  The next morning, they get caught by Sally and Ms. Baxter.  They eventually have to come out to their parents.  They both went to college and Annie wrote to Liza for a whole year.  Liza wouldn’t write back for a whole year.  Through-out the story, Liza was writing a letter back to Annie, but in the end Annie ends up calling. They both agree to meet up again.  The book is age-appropriate for 7^th-12^th graders.  I think this book shows an innocent romance that blooms between two young girls.  “Have you ever felt close to someone?  So close that you can’t understand why you and the other person have two separate skins” (p. 91).  This quote shows how the girls felt about each other.  In my opinion, it was well written and it tackled homosexuality very well.  This book may help students who are struggling with their own sexuality.   Some good follow-up books are Keeping You a Secret by Julie Ann Peters or The Gravity Between Us by Kristen Zimmer.  The theme of this book is love and friendship.  The girls become friends first then end up falling in love.  Another theme incorporated in this book is sexuality, Liza had not realized her sexuality until she met Annie.  The characters in this story are well-developed, and  Nancy Garden does a good job in telling their story.  This is a contemporary realistic fiction.  Many teenagers today have gone through an identity crisis about their sexuality.  Even though today homosexuality has become more of the norm, many teenagers still battle with it.