Going Bicoastal

In case my review was not enough, I will remind readers that I absolutely adored Dahlia Adler’s YA contemporary Cool For the Summer. It was the first review I wrote for BookishlyJewish and as such has a special place in my heart. However, I readily admit that it also tore me to shreds in a way that might not have been one hundred percent healthy for me at the time. This was not the books fault, it’s a romance with a happy ending and no trauma at all. I’m not sure why it had that effect. It just did, and it is not the first or last book to have that effect on me. Which is why I delayed about a year before picking up Going Bicoastal, Adler’s third YA romcom with Wednesday Books and the second with Jewish rep. We can call reading it now a Pride gift to myself.

The story (or stories!) follows Natalya who has been presented with a choice. Spend the summer in familiar NYC with her father or travel to LA and spend it with her estranged mother. Instead of watching Natalya make a choice – we watch her make both choices and then read two alternate love stories unfold on either coast. At first, I was wondering how Adler would explain showing both stories – was it a cosmic time loop or something? – but I quickly learned that she wouldn’t. She simply gives us one chapter in which Natalya makes a choice and then follows it with another chapter in which Natalya makes the opposite choice. We then alternate chapters in which Natalya falls in love with a boy and a girl respectively. At the end we are given a choose your own adventure style question and allowed to read a last chapter depending on which romance we are rooting for more. I actually liked them equally, so I read both.

Suffice it to say, Going Bicoastal, is extremely bisexual on the page and I would call it higher heat for a YA but around medium to light for adult. The major sex scenes fade to black after significant foreplay on the page.

The good news is that aside from a brief moment of anxiety when in the first chapter Natalya says Pride is one of the best thing about summer in NYC (mostly because I have never been, and likely will never be, able to go myself) I did not experience any of the soul crushing feelings I felt with Cool. Reading was still ego-dystonic for me simply because Natalya and I are very different people – she’s an extrovert who thinks limonana tastes like grass – but I enjoyed seeing how a person very different from myself moved through the world. In addition, as with Cool, I saw an adolescent experience that is extremely different from anything that is familiar to me. I suspect this is how many teens grow up now, but I have come to realize that the difference for me is not just because I was raised in a different community, but also because my brain works very differently from theirs. Which means that this time around the experience was actually more validating for me than not.

The Jewish rep is really excellent – with both non-Jewish love interests showing a great deal of respect for how Natalya observes Shabbat and some rules of Kashrut. In fact, their ability to accept her religion is part of what cements these relationships and there are many lovely Shabbat dinner dates. Plus, while Natalya identifies as a Conservative Jew, I am sure Jews of various identities can relate to her mental debate about whether or not to explain her observance to others. It really would be easier to just say she’s allergic to shellfish, but she goes ahead and explains anyway and is rewarded for it.

Which brings me to the last thing I’d like to mention – the acknowledgements. I was one hundred percent mortified to see right there in the last line a beautiful shout out to all the bloggers and book coverage specifically for Cool’s Sapphic Jewish rep and how this positive response influenced the writing of Going Bicoastal. I am but a tiny blog in a sea of much larger media outlets covering such books, but I am very proud of my coverage for Cool and extremely embarrassed that it took me a year to read Going Bicoastal when that thank you was sitting right there in the comments and the author has always been so supportive of BookishlyJewish. I should have shown up for this book sooner, but that acknowledgement helped me gain a little insight into what I was afraid of, maybe even why Cool ripped me up so much inside.

It is one thing to throw a book out in the world and get rejections from agents, editors, or readers. It is quite another to worry that your very own community will reject you and your writing. So yes, I completely understand why Adler felt the need to send a thank you to people who were simply doing our jobs. Cool For the Summer contained a storyline that I just was completely mentally unprepared for. Reviewer responses are never guaranteed, and I imagine this representation made the book even more terrifying to publish. It was a book of bravery and pushing boundaries. Going Bicoastal though, is a book of acceptance – not just once, but twice! Loving acceptance of ourselves is literally baked into the plot. There was never a right or wrong choice for Natalya to make. Simply two different choices that each turns out okay and shows that no matter what happens along the way, we all end up where we’re meant to be.

There is more Sapphic Jewish rep out there now than when I started this blog, but it’s not nearly as much as there could be, especially from larger publishing houses. While I’ve been successful with short fiction, Trad publishing has pretty much told me “no” repeatedly for my long form work. I’m extremely happy that there are books like Adler’s to pave the way. It gives me the patience and the strength to keep going and try again. Which means I really should not have waited the year to read it. I’ll try and get to the next one faster.

Note: Bookishlyjewish received a free copy of the book from the author

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