Foolish Hearts

This was my first Emma Mills book. For some reason, I didn't have especially high expectations going in, but I was pleasantly surprised. It was fun and funny and just plain adorable. If you read multiple books simultaneously like me, this would be a nice contrast to something heavier.

Foolish Hearts is in many ways a typical coming-of-age/romance YA novel. It features a high school theatre production interwoven with plenty of relationship drama. But in other ways, Foolish Hearts does a lot right that a lot of YA either doesn't do justice or just doesn't do. I've got two main examples.

First, the concept of consent. When Claudia rejects Gideon, he hears and accepts her “no,” even though it's not what he expected or wanted to hear. He believes her. He doesn't push back against what she says in the name of “persistence.”
A LOT of pop culture texts put forth this idea that women don't really know what they want. That women should be pursued by men until they're caught and they finally come around, at last worn down by being asked the same question (and having their same answer ignored) over and over again.
This is a weird and creepy message, arguably especially in YA. I liked a male love interest who didn't want to be with someone if she didn't want to be with him. I liked that Gideon took no for an answer. Contrast that dynamic with, say, Edward and Bella in the Twilight books, and you'll see a marked difference.

Second, I liked how Mills incorporated queer identity. I want to preface this by saying that I understand the need for stories about stigma and struggle and displacement and mental health crises and all sorts of other horrific experiences had by LGBTQ youth.
However, I think there's also a need for LGBTQ characters that are not defined by their being LGBTQ. This is what Mills does. She has characters that aren't straight, and those characters just aren't straight, like how other characters aren't gay, and those characters just aren't gay.
Sexuality is not presented as some obtrusive obstacle that inevitably arises as a point of contention or some difficult terrain to navigate. It's just, people are gay, Steven. Iris likes girls, but there's so much more to her than that. She's a dimensional interesting character. Her sexuality isn't all she is. Her sexuality is not diminished or erased, but it's far from the central focus of the book or her character.

I think, aside from just overall being aggressively endearing, these are some key reasons I enjoyed the book so much. Mills writes about love in a way that isn't so boxed in by stifling and sometimes damaging tropes. It's a sweet story about how to treat yourself and others well. It may not be revolutionary, but if a book can make me genuinely like a character named Gideon, it must be doing a lot right.