Iria Seijas-Pérez.

New York: Routledge, 2025, 224 pp.

ISBN: 9781003864332.

Sapphic Adolescent Girls in Irish Young Adult Fiction: Queering Girlhood, a monograph by Dr. Iria Seijas-Pérez, offers an extensive and detailed account of the potential of Irish Young Adult (YA) literature for sapphic literary representations. This volume comprises an introduction and seven chapters, addressing topics such as religion, racialization, witchcraft or family relations and friendships, among others. Each chapter follows a consistent and intuitive structure, ensuring coherence and cohesion in both content and form. This structure includes an introduction to the topic, a summary of the books under scrutiny, an extensive range of examples supporting the discussion, and the concluding remarks, all accompanied by explanatory notes to help the reader and a wide list of references for further research. In addition, the book concludes with a detailed index of keywords and authors, facilitating guidance throughout the book.

The introductory chapter outlines the main objective of the book, this is, the identification of the main strategies in the depiction of queer characters and the possibilities that LGBTQ+ narratives in YA literature can propose. This introduction explains the history of Irish fiction from the 1800s to the last decade, tracing the representation of LGBTQ+ identities over time. The introduction also explains the criteria and process of selection of the corpus, which ultimately consists of ten novels forming the basis of this study. This chapter presents the narrative thread of the volume, concluding with a summary of each section of analysis. Seijas-Pérez accurately warns that, when talking about Irish YA literature, she exclusively refers to the material written in English in Ireland, leaving Irish Gaelic works aside due to linguistic constraints.

The first chapter of the book presents a thorough theoretical background addressing key aspects of YA literature. Seijas-Pérez makes a journey through English-language YA literature from the 1970s to the 2010s regarding the LGBTQ+ representation, including the number of works per decade, and some relevant contextual factors. Later, the chapter delves into the reality of the LGBTQ+ characters and its broader shift at the turn of the twenty-first century. As Ireland historically relied on British literary production, Irish YA works were scarce prior to the 1990s. The author mentions that 2015 is a key year in the history of Ireland, as same-sex marriage was legalized and the number of YA novels related to the LGBTQ+ identities increased. For this reason, Seijas-Pérez decides to focus on the authors who published from that period onwards, establishing a connection with current queer characters and topics of Irish YA literature, some of which are explored in greater depth in subsequent sections.

For instance, Chapter 2 deals with the impact of the Catholic religion on the sexuality of the characters taken from three different novels: All the Bad Apples (2019), by Moïra Fowley-Doyle; Not my Problem (2021), by Ciara Smyth; and Like Other Girls (2017), by Claire Hennessy. As in every chapter, the author includes a brief summary of each book, so the reader can understand the situational context. Set largely in Catholic schools, these novels portray sapphic characters who must challenge their school’s religious ethos in order to be sexually free. For this purpose, they confront verbal harassment, homophobia and lack of identification with the values of their school, so in the end Deena, Aideen, and Lauren – the protagonists of the novels – successfully defy their educational context and embrace their sexuality. As with the summaries, Seijas-Pérez includes a great number of significant examples in each section to support the correspondent analysis.

Chapter 3 focuses on sapphic characters who have already came out, and their relationships towards family and friends. In addition to Not my Problem and Like Other Girls, The Falling in Love Montage (2020), by Ciara Smyth, is also analysed. Aideen, Lauren, and Saoirse come from three distinct family backgrounds, and their own families are usually their primary source of conflict. Even though they support their sexuality – which is the exception and not the rule, as Seijas-Pérez states – external factors such as mental illness or alcoholism affect these characters. On the topic of friendships, the author highlights the complexity of these relations. Friendships between girls are frequently characterized by compassion and loyalty, but they may also involve jealousy or toxicity. In addition, the author points out both the lack of friendship with queer boys, and also the friendship with heteronormative characters, outlining their advantages and limitations in both cases.

Chapter 4 revolves around immigration and racism in contemporary Ireland. Seijas-Pérez contextualizes these themes by illustrating the sociopolitical events that took place in Ireland in the last decades and enumerates the few racialized – and mostly secondary – characters from 2017 onwards. In this case, three novels by Adiba Jaigirdar are under scrutiny: The Henna Wars (2020), Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating (2021), and The Dos and Donuts of Love (2023), all of which feature queer protagonists of South Asian descent. The author offers an insight into the Irish multicultural reality through the eyes of non-mainstream characters. To achieve this goal, the author delves into Nishat, Hani, Ishu, and Shireen’s cultures and traits, their recurrent problems of identity – already mentioned in Chapter 2 –, and the constant pressure to meet expectations placed upon them as migrants.

Chapter 5 continues the analysis of Jaigirdar’s YA novels, in this case, looking specifically at the representation of Islam and Muslim characters in relation to their queerness and their social belonging to Western societies. Seijas-Pérez asserts that these types of characters are scarce and usually negatively represented through stereotypes. However, Jaigirdar breaks with this pattern and describes them in a positive way. The whole chapter centres on the relationship between religion and sexuality. In these novels, religion is crucial for the Muslim characters; while religion often appears marginal for their Catholic friends, Muslim characters take pride in their religious identities. Nevertheless, queerness and Islam are not compatible in the Muslim society, which usually blames the West world for such vision of sexuality. In contrast, Seijas-Pérez demonstrates how characters such as Nishat and Hani embrace their religion and sexuality as part of their identities, as being queer and Muslim is not conflictive for them.

Chapters 6 and 7 are complementary in both approach and textual corpus and may be considered together. Chapter 6 focuses on the relation between witchcraft and lesbianism, while Chapter 7 looks at magical realism and/or gothic elements being compared with queerness. The novels selected by Seijas-Pérez for the purpose are Sarah Maria Griffin’s Other Words for Smoke (2019), Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s All the Bad Apples (2019) and Deirdre Sullivan’s Perfectly Preventable Deaths (2019), as well as its sequel Precious Catastrophe in Chapter 7.

In her discussion regarding witchcraft and lesbianism, the author reflects on the connotations of the word witch and its perceptions both in Irish society and in each novel. The protagonists possess magical powers often associated with herbs and animals. Seijas-Pérez provides references from the novels to establish parallels between witchcraft and lesbianism, especially concerning happiness, self-doubt, shame and secrecy in young – and not so young – witches. Similarly, the presence of magical and Gothic elements functions as a source of ostracism for the protagonists, reinforcing their marginalisation. The authors of these novels engage with controversial events from the past to denounce injustices by using magical elements. Building on this premise, Chapter 7 explores how violence – silence and trauma regarding episodes such as the Magdelene laundries, industrial schools, and mother and baby homes –, religion – representations and visions of Virgin Mary, depicted as a role model for women in Ireland – and the appearance of haunting creatures – Bobby Dear, Sweet James, ghosts, and banshees – haunt the young protagonists. As Seijas-Pérez observes in a statement that encapsulates the volume’s central argument, the protagonists “navigate their positions as lesbians within a society whose past still looms over it” (215).

In sum, Sapphic Adolescent Girls in Irish Young Adult Fiction: Queering Girlhood successfully accomplishes its objective: the detailed exploration of how Irish YA represents sapphic characters through various aspects such as racism, religion, witchcraft, or family and friendship dynamics. It is a perfect book for starters in the field, as it combines technical yet didactic terminology with clear and effective prose. As such, the volume is a highly recommendable read for both specialists and readers approaching the topic for the first time.

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the funding by the Plan Propio de Investigación y Transferencia UEx 2024 Acción II.