When We Were Good tackles teenage lesbian's sexual discovery

Encountering LGBT characters in YA lit is nothing unusual these days. In fact, it’s almost become standard to have a supporting character who’s either lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered.

However, despite LGBT roles becoming more common in books and film, it’s still unusual to discover a YA book that features an LGBT character as its protagonist. Happily, first-time author Suzanne Sutherland’s novel When We Were Good is an excellent example of this.

Covering in equal parts 2000-era Toronto’s underground punk scene and the narrator’s own emerging lesbian sexuality, When We Were Good presents high-school senior Katherine’s journey towards self-discovery as a painful ordeal fraught with misunderstandings. Something, I’m sure, any teenager could relate to.

One does encounter a number of well-worn YA tropes, though. Katherine has the requisite death in the family, a pair of checked-out but well-meaning parents, and a best friend who is clearly more interested in boys than in her. Rather than bogging the story down, they provide a familiar landscape from which to explore more unfamiliar subject matter.

At the end, Katherine emerges as a young woman who understands both herself and what she wants from life just a little bit more. And in the end, that’s a pretty good lesson to learn.