Read September 2020

Most of my NetGalley books have been requested long enough ago that I can't remember what they're about so it was a very strange coincidence that after the disappointing bi rep of "All the Invisible Things" that I chose "Pulp" to read next.

In stark contrast the representation was brilliant. Lesbians coming out of the wazoo, at least three bisexual characters and a non-binary character who uses they/them pronouns (still a shocking rarity in fiction). They were the only character whose sexuality I was unsure of.

I loved the dual timeline narrative with its comparison of queer culture in the 50s and now. I know it's easy enough to Google but I do wish there had been more detail in the modern stuff and how things have improved as a more direct comparison.

I liked the characters - especially Abby - but they were all a little bit flat and underdeveloped and Abby's obsession got a little bit tiresome at times. But then so did Linh's obsession with college. Which reminds me, the way Abby and Linh's first date was written was utterly adorable! The author's strength is definitely writing scenes between characters! I also felt that overall despite the length the ending was a little abrupt. All in all I did really enjoy the story.

I'm afraid I was unable to read this book in time but I hope it finds the right readers. This is due to my prioritising physical advanced copies but I hope that I will be able to work better with Netgalley copies in the future.

I tried so hard to get into this book but I just found it kinda boring. I've read a few other books by Robin Talley that I really enjoyed so I thought I would like this one to. I think it's the historical aspect that I wasn't into, I guess it's just not my thing. I'm sure other people would love this book though. I don't think it's necessarily a bad book, it just wasn't to my taste and I couldn't finish it.

I found this difficult to begin. The character design felt a little forced at times but overall I enjoyed the book. The plot was complex and dealt with some interesting themes and ideas.

I was so excited going into this but the dual storyline did not work for me. I wish that this had been a duology as it would have been much more interesting to read and the author could have explored each period in greater detail. I liked the modern section more than the historical side as I did not really like Janet Jones that much. I'd pick up another book by Talley but this wasn't for me.

Didn't enjoy as much as I anticipated. There was something that just didn't click from the very start. Would not recommend this book at all.

3.5 stars 
i found abby a little hard to relate to but i really enjoyed the snippets of fake pulp novels
janet's story was much more interesting to me, would happily have read a book just of those chapters and really wanted to know more about her life

"Pulp" was the first Robin Talley book I read. I love the premise and the beginning was showing huge potential. In the end, I have a feeling the author tried to squeeze too many stories into one book. I, for one, would have been absolutely happy to just have read Abby's story and how she's discovering lesbian pulp fiction for herself. This whole back and forth eventually confused me and I somehow lost interest in continuing to read. That's not say the individual stories weren't interest. They indeed were! But I just felt that there was too much going on for me to enjoy each and every angle to the fullest. I loved how the character of Abby was written, by the way. Definitely one of the best protagonists I've ever read..

I enjoyed this book and the premise of celebrating 1950's lesbian pulp novels. We follow two characters - Janet in the 50s who is writing one of these novels, and Abby, a girl in the present-day who is doing a school project on them.
I have to say that I connected more to Janet than Abby because of her fear of being disowned by her family and of course the threat of the FBI as she lived in the era of the Lavender Scare.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review!

Split between two timelines, this book highlights the struggles and triumphs of growing up lesbian in two different generations. The romance is understated but realistic and the story and plot is dynamic and interesting. I found myself only wanting to read the past timeline, though.

A great book. Great plot that is well written and the characters are so well written and certainly make the book, I found with this book that O was totally engrossed with it. 
Great read.
Thank you to both NetGalley and HQ for my eARC of this book in exchange for my honest unbiased review

I enjoyed this book so much, and I learned about a literary genre that I'd never been aware of! I highly recommend it. The story was engaging and the characters absorbing, and what more can you ask for?

I quite enjoyed this book! It is a celebration of 1950's lesbian pulp novels, which is an area that I definitely want to read more about. We follow two characters - Janet in the 50s who is writing one of these novels, and Abby, a girl in the present-day who is doing a school project on them. We also get excerpts from Janet's novel, Women of the Twilight Realm. I would definitely like to read some of these books myself, as a couple of the ones mentioned in the novel are real! I found the historical narrative the most interesting - I didn't know much about queer history, including the Lavender Scare. Unfortunately I found Abby's narrative a little bit repetitive. 

One of the things that I liked the most is that there's an emphasis on non-romantic love, with Abby realising that she is no longer in love with her ex-girlfriend Linh. I think that this is a great theme to have, as I do tend to find a lot of queer books focus on romance. (Saying that, there's a lot of saying that they're 'just' friends which I found annoying.) 

I also thought that the book was realistic without being depressing, especially in the narrative about Janet. I was really worried that she would have a 'tragic queer' plot, but luckily that didn't happen. 

Finally, I found the use of various racial terms to be very uncomfortable. I know it was period-appropriate for the 1950s, but I just don't know if I can ever be happy with a white author using these terms.

Pulp is told with dual narratives. In 1955 Washington D.C., 18 year old Janet Jones is coming to terms with her sexuality and love for her friend Marie, an awakening that occurs after discovering romance books about women loving other women. But this is not the time or place for gay people, where you can easily lose your job and be blackballed, accused of being a Communist or sent to hospital to be 'fixed'. Yet Janet yearns to write her own romance novel, an ambition that may expose her secrets with dangerous consequences for her and Marie.

Fast forward to 2017 and 17 year old Abby Zimet is having a tough year. After what she thought was a temporary break while her girlfriend Linh was visiting relative abroad for the summer, Abby is heartbroken that they haven't gotten back together. And that Linh doesn't seem interested in doing so. Her home life is a mess, her parents have seemed to schedule their work travel trips so that one of them is away while the other is at home and if on the rare occasion they are together the tension is unbearable. To make matters worse, Abby is procrastinating with her college applications and time is running out. The only thing she is interested in is her senior year project on 1950s lesbian pulp fiction and in particular one title written under the pseudonym of Marian Love. Abby is obsessed with finding out the true identity of Marian Love.

I enjoyed this book, mostly the timeline set in Janet's era. I thought it was well developed and I could feel the fear the characters felt about being outed in a time that was dangerous to show your true identity. I didn't really connect with Abby, I felt she was a bit too chaotic for me in her obsession and didn't feel that fleshed out. Though when it comes to reading YA, I can sometimes dismiss this as a criticism because I'm no longer a teen. There's a possibility that I might have connected to Abby more if I was still a teenager and/or had gone through some of the issues she went through in the book. The book is a bit slow at times too, possibly because of the length. There's also one or two details near the end, inconsistencies that I disliked but as they are spoilers I won't go into them here. They don't really detract from the overall book.

I liked the contrast of the 1950s repression to the 2017 era where Abby and her friends her are very openly LGBTQ+, to see the progression that has been made (and highlighted that there is still progress to be made, especially when it comes to trans people). We get some intersectionality with some black lesbians and the additional problems they faced under Jim Crow law. I think the best thing about the book is how educational the book is in terms of LGBTQ+ history, it also touches upon the Lavender Scare, gives nods to Harvey Milk and Frank Kameny and of course there's so much about the lesbian pulp fiction scene. It's a great place to start to look into more queer history, which I'll probably do after this as I want to educate myself more. The book is well researched which adds to the pleasure of reading it. And it's great to have a YA book that openly has a f/f romance mentioned in the blurb, I have seen recently that some books don't bring up this up and market them as f/f books. Especially since m/m YA books seem to get marketed heavily. Katytastic on YouTube did a good video about this.

3.5

I really liked this book, I'm so glad to have read another Robin Talley book and enjoyed it. I enjoyed the plot and the learning experience. I really don't know much about the history of homosexuality, but now I have an insight in 1950s America. I didn't really enjoy the present day story until the last two chapters and it was pretty special.  Janet's story was definitely my favourite. When Robin Talley writes about history I always learn something and want to find out more.

Abbey's story of her discovery of 1950s LGBT pulp fiction and the puzzle of her attempts to track down the true story of one author's personal history is as engaging for the reader as for the main character. The constant parallel story of the 1950s experience alongside Abbey's own 21st century journey is both moving and eyeopening.. There are no comfortable 'quick fixes' and the end is as revelatory as the beginning. The two voices are convincing and compulsive; both characters are realistically flawed but experience growth and add to our empathy and understanding. A fascinating and thoughtful narrative of two widely different worlds ultimately colliding.I read it in one sitting! Highly recommended.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review! 

Prior to reading Pulp I’d heard a lot about Robin Talley and her Novels, but I’d never picked one of them up. When I read the premise for Pulp I was immediately intrigued, thankfully I wasn’t disappointed!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading from both Janet and Abbi’s  Point of view, I also enjoyed the portions of the book where we saw passages of Janet’s own novel, which came as a surprise to me as I’m often not a fan of fiction within fiction and tend to feel as though I’m pulled out of the story. However, in this case the snippets of “Women from the twilight realm” (WOTTR) really felt like they helped to add to the overarching story and helped to tie together Abbi and Janet’s narratives.

One of the Novels biggest sucssess was watching Janet and Abbi’s story’s unfolding side by side, seeing Abbi react to WOTTR at the same time as Janet was writing it and making assumptions about who she thinks Janet is was fascinating. Pulp did a fantastic job of illustrating why representation in media is so important and just how much it can impact somebody’s life. It was also wonderful seeing a wide range diverse characters of different sexuality’s, race, religion and gender identity’s.

Overall I’d highly recommend this book, particularly for anybody interested in seeing queer history portrayed in a novel and I look forward to seeing what Robin Talley publishes next!

TW: Racial and homophobic slurs, Mentions of suicide.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book for review consideration. I will not be formally reviewing it as it wasn't entirely for me.

I picked this book up because I liked the cover and the premise sounded pretty interesting – two stories set sixty years apart, about lesbian teens growing up in DC. I try to read as much queer lit as possible, but it’s not always easy to find, particularly the f/f side of things.

The two characters are Abby, our modern teen, who is wrestling with a breakup, her parents’ disintegrating marriage, and the pressures of college applications. She finds solace in a creative writing project researching lesbian pulp novels in the 50s. One particular book, Women of the Twilight Realm, catches her attention, and she’s consumed by her obsession with finding out more about the book’s author, Marian Love.

In the fifties, Janet Jones is only just beginning to figure out that a) she likes girls, and b) so do plenty of other women. Her best friend Marie has just got a job as a typist in the state department, though, and there are rumours of the abrupt interrogations and dismissals of anyone even vaguely suspected of being gay. When Janet discovers the pulp lesbian books, she adores them as proof that she’s not alone.

Both Abby and Janet were really great characters. I liked how some of their struggles as young lesbian women were the same, but of course they were also entirely different. Abby is out and proud at school and to her friends and family – her friend group is made of a diverse range of gender identities and sexualities – and she regularly goes to protests and doesn’t hesitate to suggest writing semi-erotic lesbian pulp fiction for a school project. Janet, on the other hand, is constantly terrified, elated to find the woman she loves returns her feelings, yet petrified of what might happen to both of them if they’re discovered. I found the fifties sections much harder to read than the modern stuff – I think out of all the historical periods I read about, the fifties is probably the one I find scariest. It’s a decade we laud for its aesthetic, but when you actually look into things, it’s full of looming threats – the Cold War, Jim Crow, and the Lavender Scare all come into play to some degree or another in this book. But it seems well-researched as well as being very well-written.

Abby’s problems were much easier to confront, because they’re the sort of things that are very common for modern teenagers. She broke up with her girlfriend Linh before Linh visited her family in Vietnam last summer and thought they’d get back together when Linh returned. But they haven’t, and Abby can’t figure out how she feels or what’s going on. Her home life is also a mess, with her little brother acting out and her parents constantly avoiding each other and arguing when they’re together. She’s starting to fall behind in her classes and only reading Women of the Twilight Realm helps her to escape from it all. I really liked Abby – she felt like a very realistic teenager. The only thing I struggled with was her school, which seems incredibly liberal. Obviously, I’m from the UK (where we still don’t really have many schools like this) and my perception of US schools isn’t great – both in the media and in fiction they don’t come across very well, whereas Abby’s school seemed like paradise! The teachers accompany them to protests and the school celebrates Indigenous People’s Day instead of Columbus Day. I guess my issue here is that I’m sure schools like this exist, but it’s the first time I’ve come across one in fiction!

Anyway, I really loved the book – it was a bit longer than I might’ve liked but it’s essentially telling two separate stories, so I can understand the need for an extra hundred pages. It was just a lovely, refreshing read for me, and I’m so glad there are authors like Robin Talley out there.

In writing a research paper for school, Abby delves into the shady world of historical lesbian pulp fiction.  In doing so, she deals with issues in her own life and grows confidence in herself. It's a good book for people trying to find themselves even after they think they already have.