Annie on My Mind

Annie on My Mind

Garden, N. (1982). Annie on my mind. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

For starters, Annie on My Mind is a very difficult book to locate.  Whether this is because it is a controversial novel, especially for the time it was written, or because it was written so long ago, I had a difficult time getting my hands on it.  Having said that, Annie, somewhat ahead of its time,  is about two girls, Liza Winthrop and Annie Kenyon, who meet at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and find themselves drawn to one another and ultimately get caught together, and reported to Liza's school board,  while pet-sitting for a gay teacher/couple.  In the meantime, Liza confesses her homosexuality to her parents while at the same time defending herself at her private school for not tattling on a classmate after she witnesses something that is against the rules.  Ultimately, the girls have the freedom to express themselves but the reader doesn’t know if they find their happily-ever-after.  Because Annie deals with such an emotionally charged social issue, I think the book would be appropriate for upper middle and high school students.  As a contemporary fiction novel, I feel that students today, especially those who share some of the same conflicting issues such as sexual identity, can easily identify with the novel, in spite of the fact that it’s an older book.