Beyond Clueless

Overview

When her parents transfer her to an all-girls Catholic school, Marty Sullivan feels like her social life has been put on ice. Her best friend Jimmy remains behind at their old public school, where he comes out, starts dating, and slides into a new circle of friends that suddenly has no room for her.

A part in the school's production of Into the Woods throws Marty back into Jimmy's orbit, since his new friends are cast in the show as well. Rehearsals also put her within reach of Felix Peroni, a castmate whose attention seems to promise the fresh start she's been missing.

What follows tests both relationships at once: whether Marty and Jimmy's friendship can survive the distance that's grown between them, and whether Felix is actually the boyfriend he appears to be. Marty has to figure out which of her instincts to trust before she can sort either one out.

A Story About Growing Apart and Catching Up

Alsenas builds the book around a common but rarely dramatized adolescent fear: that a friendship formed before either party had much of a self to speak of might not survive the process of each person figuring out who they are. Jimmy's coming out is the catalyst, but the novel treats it as one more variable in a friendship already strained by new schools, new casts of characters, and diverging schedules, rather than as the sole source of conflict.

The musical-within-the-story does double duty as a structural device, giving Marty and Jimmy a shared project to reconnect over while also supplying the setting where Marty's romance with Felix develops. That romance, in turn, gives the book its narrative tension, since Marty's judgment about Felix is repeatedly shown to be shakier than her judgment about most everything else in her life. The novel sits within a wave of mid-2000s and early-2010s YA that folded queer coming-of-age plots into otherwise conventional high-school ensemble stories, treating a friend's coming out as ordinary information rather than the book's central twist.

Why Beyond Clueless Has Been Challenged

Jimmy's storyline, which follows him coming out, entering a same-sex relationship, and building a new friend group around that identity, sits at the center of most objections raised against the book. Critics who have sought its removal have generally framed the plot as unsuitable for the age group the book is marketed to, arguing that a supporting character's sexual orientation and dating life shouldn't be presented as a matter-of-fact part of a teen ensemble comedy. Some objections extend to the broader teenage romance elements in the novel, including Marty and Felix's relationship, on the grounds that any depiction of adolescent dating and attraction is inappropriate for school library shelves regardless of the characters' orientation. In the catalog tracked here, that opposition has translated into a challenge recorded in one state and one district.