Last Night At The Telegraph Club
You guys, do you have any idea - any idea - how romantic and compelling Malinda Lo's "Last Night At The Telegraph Club" is? Seriously, I hope you have all had your coffee because this is a WHIRLWIND of fangirling - including, but not limited to:
• The super intense level of grossness McCarthyism introduced for immigrant communities in the US in the 1950s (and what is McCarthyism anyway?*)
• Contradictory expectations of womanhood - what people want from you sexually vs what they want you to be in public. Which, from our view, was even worse for the community of young women in this book
• How sexuality and puberty can be really scary at the beginning (and all the way through, let's be real). And whether that makes us less sex-positive (we don't think it does. But we've been wrong before...)
• Kath is scarily similar to Katie and we don't know how we're only realising it now
• Fear for your own community making it next to impossible to empathise with others in a similar situation (and therefore, somehow, Chloe's first ever Woke Alert)
• How making a character's misery just a tad less miserable gets us as readers into their shoes SO much quicker (which, in turn, makes us just as miserable as they are, instead of just looking at someone suffering)
• Sarah saying "advantage" instead of "advances" and no one noticing
• Clee and Katie saying "level" way too much, and have since signed up for a vocabulary building course
• Katie getting too excited reading a bit from the book about a newspaper article and barely explains what she's talking about
I mean, of course there are tangents - it wouldn't be CL4L without them! This week, the girls also talk:
• Poking your Mam in the boob age 4
• How Sarah has managed to pee herself while working out
• The fact we can all have a go at each other and not worry about our friendship being affected by unsaid things
• The girls' top 5 Katie Murphy intro songs
• Birth of the name "TeQuliodhna"
I mean, it does NOT get better than that you guys!
*If you want to read more about the effect of McCarthyism on the Asian American community we loved this article that PBS published as part of their “Asian American and Pacific Islander Experience” feature collection: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/mccarthy-numbed-with-fear-chinese-americans/
Catch the full episode
More on Last Night At The Telegraph Club:
“That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other.” And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.
America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father–despite his hard-won citizenship–Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.
More on Malinda Lo:
Malinda Lo is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, including most recently A Scatter of Light.
Her novel Last Night at the Telegraph Club won the National Book Award, the Stonewall Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Michael L. Printz Honor, and was an LA Times Book Prize finalist.
Her books have received 15 starred reviews and have been finalists for multiple awards, including the Andre Norton Award and the Lambda Literary Award. She has been honored by the Carnegie Corporation as a Great Immigrant. Malinda’s short fiction and nonfiction has been published by The New York Times, NPR, Autostraddle, The Horn Book, and multiple anthologies. She lives in Massachusetts with her wife and their dog.
To find out more about Malinda Lo, visit