“Tiffany and Tiger’s Eye”: New Young Adult horror novel with lesbian romance from Foxglove Lee (Prizm Books)

Tiffany and Tiger Eye by Foxglove Lee is a teen horror novel with a lesbian romance set in the 1980’s and starring a lonely, butch-presenting girl. It’s published by Prizm, where my books live as well, so I’ve had it on my to-read list ever since I got the notification on the internal author mailing list. 

I think it’s a good read. It was a total relief to read a “historical” (zomg, the 1980’s were so long ago! How did that happen?) lesbian novel that, while not ignoring homophobia, didn’t make it the focal point or chief antagonist of the book. In fact, while one of my favorite images from the book was the bisexual love interests’s grandmother literally whacking at homophobic bullies with a broom (go Grandma!), the main antagonists of the book, besides the Evil Doll ™, are isolation-in-general (not just from being a butch lesbian but also from being poor and dorky and for family scandals that are supposed to be a spoiler so I’ll leave them be. And also the usual amount of insecurity many teens have about their love interests at that age.)

The basic plot is that the protagonist’s creepy little doll gets jealous when she gets interested in a flesh-and-blood girl and goes progressively more and more apeshit.

Kudos to the author for having the protag backpedal on her brief moment of biphobia, by the way — I was glad that was something the character was going through, and not the author. Especially since I’m somewhat of a “Tiffany” type myself — without spoiling anything, I, too, prefer women, but my tastes in men are very similar to hers. (If you follow my blog or have read my book, you already can probably guess what I mean.)

Definitely worth a read if you’re looking for lesbian YA where you don’t have to worry about the usual “nobody leaves anybody for a man, nobody dies, nobody gets fired for being gay, blah blah blah” list of things that sometimes make me scared of other people’s books 😛

Even her family was supportive, by the way. I read it on my phone or I’d copy and paste, but the aunt who’s cottage the protag is staying with for the summer says something like “Don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise” after saying her lesbianism is okay.