Review: Love & Lies

Wittlinger, Ellen. Love & Lies: Marisol’s Story. Simon & Schuster, 2008.

I’ve been waiting for this book for ten years, ever since Marisol Guzman first made her appearance as a secondary character in Wittlinger’s Printz Award Honor book, Hard Love. The tough, confident, and sarcastic baby dyke nearly stole the show from Gio, the straight main character who had fallen hopelessly in love with her.

Love & Lies takes up four months after Hard Love ended, at the beginning of what should have been Marisol’s freshman year in college. She’s made the decision to take a year off before starting at Stanford so she can write a novel and try out independence. She works at a diner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and lives in an apartment with her best friend from childhood, Birdie, and his lover, Damon.

Marisol seems to have everything going for her except that she’s been unlucky in love. The first line of her semi-autobiographical novel describes her current situation perfectly: Christina had always believed she was born lucky — smart, funny, and just good-looking enough to get pretty much everything she wanted except, for the thing she longed for most: love.

She and Gio have signed up for the same novel-writing course in an adult education program, and Marisol falls head-over-heals in love with the instructor, Olivia Frost. Olivia is beautiful, witty and charismatic, and she soon zeros in on Marisol as the most gifted student in her class. Marisol delights in the attention she receives from her teacher, and is thrilled to learn that Olivia has more than an academic interest in her. Although Olivia’s actions strike Marisol as “unteacherlike,” she is so caught up in lust and emotion that she very quickly gets in over her head.

Marisol’s infatuation with the older, more experienced woman soon begins to overshadow everything else in her life. She can’t see, for example, that Lee, a young woman her age, newly out and newly moved to Cambridge, is crazy about her. She begins to lie to her friends and family about the extent of her relationship with Olivia, and also begins to lie to Olivia about time she spends with her friends. Olivia, it turns out, is intensely jealous and controlling.

All the while these real-life scenes play out, we see the fictionalized version of it played out in Marisol’s novel. Wittlinger draws subtle parallel between the two: the novel, like Marisol’s love life, begins to take on a life of its own, going off in its own direction, pulling her along with it. But it also becomes a way for Marisol to figure out what’s really in her heart. The lines her characters speak often come as a revelation to her, helping her to figure out things she hadn’t consciously known about herself or others in her life.

And then there’s the added tension of knowing that Olivia will read and critique Marisol’s writing. It’s almost painful to see how vulnerable she allows herself to become around Olivia, especially given that readers will begin to suspect, long before Marisol does, that Olivia is not what she claims to be. Still, the love scenes between them are so steamy, without being explicit, that we can understand how she could fall so hard and fast. Olivia is the stuff so many lesbian fantasies are made of: what young dyke could resist a gorgeous, older woman who told her she was brilliant, especially when the thing she most longed for was love?

Through it all, Marisol remains the character we came to know and love in Hard Love: unflinching, unsentimental, and wickedly funny. She is one of the most realistic lesbian characters ever to appear in a young adult novel, and Love & Lies is one of the best LGBTQ novels yet.