Sarcasm / spoiler alert. Gee, I'm so glad everybody ends up straight in the end!!!! What a disappointing book. I'm also kind of confused about how a character who goes on and on about how beautiful and amazing her roommate is and who gets thrills from kissing her and thinks about her all the time so suddenly decides she's not into girls. ( )

Brooklyn Shepard comes from a theatrical family. They are singers, directors, producers, coaches (her mother is a noted voice coach) and for the most part they love to perform. Every Monday night is Family Night when friends and family gather at the Shepard’s Manhattan apartment and perform. Brooklyn gets away with being the piano accompanist and composing parodies with her Uncle Harrison.

This summer Brooklyn is attending the Allerhale Playhouse as an intern. Her parents, uncle and their friends were all once interns there. There she is supposed to get her first chance to really perform on stage, so she is totally upset that the only acting role she has is in an experimental piece which will be performed in an ancillary theater. She can’t bear to tell her parents since her mother has made it clear that she hates such productions, so she lies and says she is in Bye Bye Birdie.

Brooklyn’s roommate is the gorgeous, talented, Zoe, and she’s surprised when Zoe wants to be her friend. (She’s keeping her parent’s notoriety a secret because she wants to be befriended for herself, not her parents.) Her relationship with Zoe soon becomes something more than mere friendship. Brooklyn has had a boyfriend or two but never a girlfriend (although she knows her parents would be OK with that kind of relationship). This relationship brings up a lot of diverging feelings, which she deals with throughout the book.

Look Both Ways by Alison Cherry is a charming book. Brooklyn and Zoe are both great characters and you can feel the emotions they each exhibit. The remainder of the Shepard family and friends are just how you would envision a theatrical group, boisterous, emotive, and loving. I’m not sure the ending is how we would imagine it from the beginning of the book, but it is realistic and satisfying.

All in all, Look Both Ways is a rewarding read in every respect. ( )

I honestly do not how to feel about this piece. I liked so much of it, but there was an equal amount i really disliked, and I can't help feeling like it maybe had a less than subtle anti-LGBT agenda.

The protagonist makes you want to root for her, but in the end i couldn't. Although i suppose it's realistic for a lot of people, Brooklyn never stopped believing she could lie her way out of her problems. If the point of this work was to illustrate how little that's actually helpful then great. However, the didactic falls short in that Brooklyn never really learns from her mistakes or grows up in anything like a transformative way, in essence telling the reader it's okay to be shallow and spineless.

I really liked Zoe and although she's supposed to be painted as someone who doesn't understand that Brooklyn is asexual, that character flaw falls flat--someone who believes in polyamory and has been success with it, believes in always putting their partner's needs first (and also is well-versed in a multiplicity of relationships).

In much the same way, Brooklyn herself makes a similarly bizarre copout. Everything about her character makes her seem asexual (and i suppose growing up in such a sex-positive culture could have that effect), but the author decides instead that Brooklyn would be totally fine getting physical with a guy... Which is frankly too difficult to swallow based on her upbringing. Her character demonstrates an intellectual maturity that ought to be able to recognize by the end that she's asexual. If that's true, it would be impossible for her to believe getting physical with a guy would be in any way easier.

Couple this with the fact that her mother, who's painted as being someone who can't understand her daughter's needs at all, is the one pushing for her to be gay. The surreality of a straight parent actually hoping their child turns out gay is also very difficult to imagine. The only explanation for this character's motivations that makes much sense would be if the author wanted to paint her as pushing a "radical leftist agenda" or some such conservative rhetoric.

Thus, these characters are grievously flawed... but not in a way that's actually believable? I kept expecting to hear that their lack of sleep and proper nutrition was starving their brains. I can't in good conscience recommend this piece. ( )