Liza puts aside her feelings for Annie after the disaster at school, but eventually she allows love to triumph over the ignorance of people.
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Summary: Great!! Comment: I thought this book was great, i mean yeah there was something missing more details or something not really sure, but i though the overall book was great. *SPOILER* I loved the part when they first kissed i meant the detail there was amazing i could really see them in my head.*END SPOILER* I recommend this beautiful love story. Customer Rating: Summary: A Story of First Love... Comment: I was hesitant at first to read what is essentially a young adult book, but the story told in Annie on My Mind captivated me. Nancy Garden tells the story of Annie and Liza, two seniors in high school, from different worlds and different socio-economic backgrounds.
The two girls meet by chance and develop a friendship that evolves into something more intense and intimate. They fall in love with each other.
What Garden does in this book, and more successfully in her follow-up Good Moon Rising, is she allows the story to be about two people meeting, getting to know each other and having that first experience with love. Though at times, the novel addresses the challenges of lesbian love, and coming out, Garden manages to keep the story on track as a story of first love.
I imagine Annie and Liza could be any two teenagers, trying to find their way in the world and finding each other in the process.
Customer Rating: Summary: What a bore! Comment: I'm sorry...but seriously...this book just bored me to tears. I understand how important this book is for young lesbian teens who feel confused, lost, alone, etc. on their feelings about other girls...but i couldn't get past most chapters without just feeling bored to tears. I felt like the whole story was so wooden, the characters are not interesting, and the way they talk and react with one another is just not realistic to me, its just...well, a bit too flowery and trying too hard to be poetic and deep. I don't clearly understand why they have this chemistry either...I just don't understand the hype surrounded by this book. Lesbian lovers, great! But that alone doesnt necessarily make a good story. Customer Rating: Summary: I agree with almost everyone else Comment: I am having sort of dreamlike images come back to me.
I think I may have been an Annie to someone very important, who I cared about very much. I know I am not supposed to use the word 'very.' :)
in a metaphorical sort of way of course. metaphor seems to lend itself to my life.
the delayed consequences of early childhood brain injury meant that I lost recognition and insight and memory and I became severely mentally ill as well. however now I have a great deal of recovery. after more than 20 years of work.
insight is coming back to me. well I never really had it. what I never had is returning, so to speak. that is, I had a limited insight of a teenager. I did not develop into an adult with insight. I fell into illness in early 1988 and I had brain injury on top of it.
my feeling, of having been in a relationship like this, got me come back from the dead so to speak. someone told me to cross the river Styx and come back and I have done so. I have been at least as ill as John Nash and probably sicker than that. I functioned with something resembling autism, but not exactly, and bipolar disorder among other things but I had no sense of self, no rest, no motor skills really, and no insight. and a bunch of cognitive impairments.
I was told I had very rare pathology such that doctors had seen almost no one who was living and functioning with this. I could write a journal article, or just be one.
adults can separate people from each other but so can neurology.
I also have to say these memories could be quite inaccurate. well I remember sitting in a room and being told 'we are not sure why you are still alive' and something that looked like a branching tree and the word, dendrites. and dendrites was a bad word in context. there were people looking horrified and bad words and drawings on pieces of paper.
my felt reality was push up to sanity and work on motor skills or deteriorate and end up physically immobile and mentally without consciousness. and I think that was basically accurate.
but, I'm back. you know, the focus of this book is love and love can motivate people to do some really remarkable things. like plow through books by eugene bleuler in search of an answer about their mental illness. :) things like that.
hatred isn't much of a motivator. love is. but that's a little hard to hold on to when you have massive cerebellar pathology. :)
the thing about having been THIS ill is that regaining the memory of something like this, or even a feeling that is a false memory if that is the case, is like regaining life in itself.
without memory, I was retelling the story of orpheus and eurydice over and over, where he brings her out of the grave and looks back too soon and she falls in.
except I am orpheus b/c my brain dictates that. to the world, I am lost but to me, I lost someone b/c I looked at the wrong time.
according to my therapist I have been very difficult to understand. she said it was a reality-based perception that without an enormous amount of work, I was on borrowed time.
but now I am returning to the human race for the first time :), so to speak. I am discovering that I can be an adult with insight and memory. and that is wonderful to me.
although, if I am telling the truth, having a couple more friends in my life would not hurt either :), but as I get well I realize that I said and did some awful things when I was sick, not knowing or understanding what was going on.
that is the tragedy of loss of insight and loss of memory and then everything getting jumbled up.
the good news is that it has been reversed in our lifetimes. Customer Rating: Summary: a rare story which outlines the signs and progression of true love Comment: Annie on My Mind is the quintessential story of two young women exploring love for the first time. It is the reminiscience of Liza, now a freshman in college, about her relationship to Annie during the previous year. First published in 1982, the story aided the cultural validation of lesbian love. Thsi 25th edition includes an interview with the author which complements the story. Annie on My Mind is included on school reading lists, and usually cannot be found on the library's shelves. What readers will find is not a 'butch/macho/lesbian' scenario, but a tender story of two persons innocently adn naively exploring their natural inclinations towrds first love. The heart of the story is taht their love becomes an enduring love, a reare feat. Readers, bi-curious or straight, young or old, hunger to learn the signs and progression of true love, as outlined in this story. This (along with good writing) is what keeps this book in print.
