Annie on My Mind
Among the first positive lesbian YA romances. Annie and Liza's love is warm, specific, and joyful before the world tries to punish them for it. Garden understood that teenagers needed to see love like theirs portrayed as real and good, not tragic or shameful. A quiet revolutionary act that still moves readers.
Even fans concede the early chapters drag: the costume party scene that's supposed to charm reads to some as stiff and dated instead, and one reader admits the book overall felt “a little slow at times,” enough that a few give up partway through. The story stays locked to Liza's point of view throughout, and reviewers wish Annie got her own interiority instead of coming through secondhand. The school and its administration read thin to some, and Liza's own family and religious background stay underdeveloped in the background rather than getting real page time. For readers who don't connect, the whole thing lands flat: one writes “this is just not doing it for me right now,” another dismisses it outright as simply “not my genre of book,” and a third calls it a story “without any pretensions or of particular depth.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
