Music From Another World is a young adult book set in 1977 about teenagers in California becoming friends, getting into music, and dealing with the realities of sexuality in late 70s America. Tammy's strictly religious family don't know that she's gay, but she writes unposted letters to her hero Harvey Milk to describe her situation to someone. When a school project forces her to have a pen pal from the state, she didn't expect to get someone from San Francisco. Sharon is getting into punk and hiding her brother's sexuality from their mother, and Tammy becomes someone she can start to share things with via their letters. When things escalate, it turns out Tammy and Sharon might need each other more than they realised.

Robin Talley has written another young adult book that combines important historical moments—in this case, Harvey Milk's political career, and parts of the battle for LGBT rights—with a story of friendship and love and people standing up for who they are. The novel is entirely written in letters, both unposted ones and those between the two protagonists, and the style works well both to bring across the perspectives of the two characters and the ways they're being honest or not so honest with each other and themselves, and to frame the novel's setting as a time before an easier way to get to know a remote stranger. In a world where people use the internet to find other people like themselves, Music From Another World shows how people did the same thing before it.

This is the sort of novel that allows people, both young adult and otherwise, to enjoy the empowering narrative and also think about important movements and milestones of the twentieth century that it is worth finding out more about. It is gripping and readable, showing how struggles both political and personal haven't necessarily changed a huge amount, and how people can fight to be themselves.

Music From Another World was an utter joy to read - I wish books like this had existed when I was a teenager. I ploughed through it, "delighting" anyone who was sitting near me with updates about what was happening.
My only issue with the book is that, especially for the first half, all of the antagonists were almost caricature villains - they were so horrible! To be honest though, I probably wouldn't have wanted to see a sympathetic depiction of Aunt Mandy anyway - but at times she was almost supernaturally terrible. I'm also not usually a fan of epistolary novels, and at times this format can get in the way of the plot.
Regardless, I felt so buoyant and hopeful at the end of this that I had to give it 5 stars.

Music From Another World is f/f YA, but historical - it's set in the 70s ('77-'78) and is an epistolary slash diary entry novel. The two main characters, Tammy and Sharon, come from very Christian backgrounds in California and are paired together in a pen pal scheme between their two (Christian) schools. They write diary entries and letters to each other - Tammy is gay, Sharon realises over the course of the novel that she's bisexual, they fall in love and end up together.

I really, really liked it! It was a fast read (I read it in 4 hours, YMMV, but I wouldn't say a light read), I liked the characters, their struggles and all the history that came with the setting. I researched feminist/lesbian bookshops for a paper last term and I was very pleased to see Sharon get involved with that environment and have it represented so faithfully. The book is set at a very tumultuous time for gay rights in the US, with a strong focus on Harvey Milk (Tammy's diary entries are addressed to him, actually). There's history there I didn't know simply because I didn't grow up with it (I'm much more familiar with queer history in Scandinavia) and I also haven't gotten round to watching the Harvey Milk movie...I've been putting it off because Sean Penn. I really got the feeling, reading this book, that it was contemporary - it seemed so well researched and the way Sharon and Tammy talked about their feelings and fears and hopes and desires, set against the backdrop of 70s queer, punk and feminist movements, it just made it all...very real. I liked it. There are messy and complicated feelings and relationships in this book (Sharon's big brother is gay and is the reason she got into the feminist environment - more specifically because she didn't want to be the only girl on Castro Street in San Francisco where her brother was hanging out with other gay men, so drifted towards the lesbian area instead....) As for content warnings, well, neither of their families take it very well that they're queer and there's reference to pray the gay away camps.

The one thing I didn't like about the book is how it was supposed to be letters and diary entries, but the way these girls composed their diary entries they read like prose with dialogue tags and descriptions and all. It felt like a cop-out to be honest - if the author felt she couldn't get the story across without 'regular' prose, why package it as diary entries? The girls did have distinctive voices and wrote their diary entries and letters very differently, but I just...the diary aspect of the diary entries was not believable to me and it kept throwing me out of the book. So five stars rounded up.