Can I ask what squicked you?

This seems to be a thing with Lyga. The short story he wrote for Geektastic managed to squick me out right at the end. Enough so that I nixed everything by him from my “to-read” shelf on goodreads.

LOL@ your Kindle. I would probably restrain myself in that case if I had one. But a gentle shaking of the Kindle might be in order.

Pretty much this. At first I was like, okay, MAYBE this is an extended discussion of grieving and how much mourning a lost parent and struggling with clinical depression can mess with an adolescent’s thoughts…? Oh. Never mind.

My Kindle is too expensive to throw across the room!

Side note: something I hate SO MUCH is when a book IS pretty good, and you’re about 85% of the way in, and suddenly BAM with the really ugly social message from left field that, supposedly, the text was leading up to. I’ve been known to throw a book across the room as if it had cooties when that happens.

I mean, I’m sure it has its virtues if you made it 85% in. But this shit about same sex attraction is nothing I want to read.

Also, the things Kyra and Jecca were looking for were comfort, safety, and affection. So… if those aren’t good reasons to have sex, what is? I guess the thing that also trips me out about this passage is that suddenly sex/desire/orientation goes from being about what bodies you’re into to being about life plans/couple-dom.

It also feels like it’s putting the orientation label ahead of the experience, if that makes any sense. Like, she’s trying to date within the orientation she intellectually thinks she has. I think you should just accept your attractions as they come, whether they fit a label or your perceived orientation or not.

The thing is, Kyra is SUPPOSED to be a jerk — she’s just been forcibly institutionalized by her parent after he finds out that she’s still suicidal and struggling over the death of her mother a few years earlier. She’s not in the best place right now, at all, which leads her to strike out at the people who care about her (like Fanboy, her friends she’s constantly judging, a teacher who wants to sympathize with her, and her father). That’s totally cool. What I’m objecting to is that the WAY she’s attacking her female friends in particular (mentally calling them sluts, constantly critiquing their outfits and sexualizing their bodies, etc) AND her most significant sexual relationship being with a girl means that it can’t be A Lightning Bolt realization that she’s straight. There’s groundwork that could have been laid in-text to make that work.