Music From Another World is f/f YA, but historical - it's set in the 70s ('77-'78) and is an epistolary slash diary entry novel. The two main characters, Tammy and Sharon, come from very Christian backgrounds in California and are paired together in a pen pal scheme between their two (Christian) schools. They write diary entries and letters to each other - Tammy is gay, Sharon realises over the course of the novel that she's bisexual, they fall in love and end up together.

I really, really liked it! It was a fast read (I read it in 4 hours, YMMV, but I wouldn't say a light read), I liked the characters, their struggles and all the history that came with the setting. I researched feminist/lesbian bookshops for a paper last term and I was very pleased to see Sharon get involved with that environment and have it represented so faithfully. The book is set at a very tumultuous time for gay rights in the US, with a strong focus on Harvey Milk (Tammy's diary entries are addressed to him, actually). There's history there I didn't know simply because I didn't grow up with it (I'm much more familiar with queer history in Scandinavia) and I also haven't gotten round to watching the Harvey Milk movie...I've been putting it off because Sean Penn. I really got the feeling, reading this book, that it was contemporary - it seemed so well researched and the way Sharon and Tammy talked about their feelings and fears and hopes and desires, set against the backdrop of 70s queer, punk and feminist movements, it just made it all...very real. I liked it. There are messy and complicated feelings and relationships in this book (Sharon's big brother is gay and is the reason she got into the feminist environment - more specifically because she didn't want to be the only girl on Castro Street in San Francisco where her brother was hanging out with other gay men, so drifted towards the lesbian area instead....) As for content warnings, well, neither of their families take it very well that they're queer and there's reference to pray the gay away camps.

The one thing I didn't like about the book is how it was supposed to be letters and diary entries, but the way these girls composed their diary entries they read like prose with dialogue tags and descriptions and all. It felt like a cop-out to be honest - if the author felt she couldn't get the story across without 'regular' prose, why package it as diary entries? The girls did have distinctive voices and wrote their diary entries and letters very differently, but I just...the diary aspect of the diary entries was not believable to me and it kept throwing me out of the book. So five stars rounded up.