{book Review}

I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

Tags: || YA romantic comedy, academic rivals-to-lovers, LGBTQIAP+ rep, wlw, queer/bi MCs, trans/nb/questioning rep

Format: Audiobook – The narrator was excellent! The same narrator as One Last Stop and she did an amazing job voicing all the characters!

After reading One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston, I vowed to read anything she wrote in the future. When I read the synopsis of IKSW, I knew I had to read it too. And like her other books, McQuiston did not disappoint!

I Kissed Shara Wheeler is a mix of John Green’s Paper Towns and if Mean Girls was slightly less, well, mean ( think more queer and less toxicity)

I Kissed Shara Wheeler takes place in a rural Alabama town in a private Christian high school, where being different is punished and preached against. In a place where being queer is not accepted and most kids are fearfully in the closet or repressing their innermost selves and desires. The book follows high achiever Chloe Green as she looks for clues to why Shara, her nemesis for valedictorian, kissed her one day and then disappeared, leaving a trail of notes for Chloe and an unlikely alliance of Shara’s boyfriend, Smith, and her boy-next-door friend Rory, helping Chloe trace the puzzle of clues to Shara’s location. Along the way, they discover more about who Shara was and who they themselves truly are and truly want to be, in a place that makes it hard to be anything outside of the status quo.

“High school matters because it shapes how we see the world when we enter it. We carry the hurt with us, the confirmed fears, the insecurities people used against us. But we also carry the moment when someone gave us a chance, even though they didn’t have to. The moment we watched a friend make a choice we didn’t understand at first because they’re brave in a different way. The moment a teacher told us they believed in us. The moment we told someone who we are and they accepted us without question. The moment we felt in love.
“Most of the things we are feeling right now are things we’re feeling for the first time. We’re learning what it means to feel them. What we mean to one another. Of course that matters.”

– Casey McQuiston, I Kissed Shara Wheeler

I was worried for a bit that it was a “too on the nose” knock-off of Paper Towns, but by putting the characters themselves at the center of the plot development, instead of the search for the elusive Shara, McQuiston turns the trope on its head as a means to self-discovery for all of the characters rather than a play for a problematic manic pixie dream girl/cruel trick by an academic rival. I was worried terribly that I was growing to hate Shara until her own motivations became clearer and the unraveling of the complexities of who she and the other characters were, began to come undone. The thing about McQuiston is that all her characters are just so real. In I Kissed Shara Wheeler, every character is so raw, real, emotional, and vulnerable, they are flawed in ways that you can’t help but be both exasperated and desperately rooting for them to win. The book was chocked full of beautiful complex queer characters with many varying perspectives of what it meant to be queer. The ending was just pure queer positivity that was cute and fun to read and while some of the positivity felt a bit more fairy tale than reality, the conversation around queerness in a small town really captured the experience.

This is the kind of book that rural kids in the south and midwest need to read, to see themselves in these characters. As a person who grew up in a fundamentalist southern baptist church, who didn’t see let alone even know much about, healthy ways of being and living as queer or queer relationships, a book like this would have changed my life. Seeing much of myself reflected in McQuiston’s characters was healing and wonderful. So much of Shara’s repressed feelings for Chloe and her way of handling them, from throwing herself into making valedictorian to trying to make Chloe really see her for her, resonated deeply with me. Watching Smith explore his gender expression and realize his own sexuality and feelings, realizing that being “told” boys are only supposed to do this thing and feel this way was not the only way a person could be, was absolutely beautiful. Showing the nuance of so many characters wanting to be themselves while also having to tread lightly and stay closeted for fear of their family finding out, being kicked out or disowned, or having to come to terms with their complicated feelings about faith and identity — these are all things that those of us who grew up in the church or in families who did not allow exploration outside of heterosexual relationships or anything but cisgender binary expressions of identity, know so intimately.

“Shame is a way of life here. It’s stocked in the vending machines, stuck like gum under the desks. Spoken in morning devotionals. She knows now that there’s a bit of it in her.

It was an easy choice not to go back in the closet when she got here, but if she’d grown up here, she might never have come out at all. She might be a completely different person.”

– Casey McQuiston, I Kissed Shara Wheeler

This book is a beautiful, lighthearted, positive story about the realities of being closeted and queer in rural Christian America, and it looks at both the ugly and the beautiful of growing up in places like this. It’s a book I wish I could give to my younger self to say, see? Look, there are other people out there like you, you are not alone, you’ll find your people soon, don’t give up hope. But it’s also fun and cute and a great YA romantic comedy about being a teenager and just trying to figure yourself out and where you fit in the world.

Thank you, NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the audiobook ARC!