Going Bicoastal

Overview

Dahlia Adler's Going Bicoastal follows Natalya Fox, a New York teenager confronted with a single decision that will define her entire summer: remain in the city with her father, or fly to Los Angeles to spend time with the mother she's grown distant from. Rather than settling on one outcome, the novel splits into two parallel storylines that unfold side by side, following Natalya through both versions of her summer at once.

In the New York thread, she works up the nerve to pursue a girl she's quietly liked for a long time while sorting out what she wants from her future. In the Los Angeles thread, she attempts to repair years of distance with her mother and finds herself unexpectedly drawn to a boy she never anticipated meeting. Both timelines trace the same emotional terrain — family repair, self-discovery, first love — arriving at it from different coasts and different people.

The dual-track structure lets Adler explore how the same person might grow differently depending on circumstance, without treating either path as more "real" or more correct than the other.

A Story Told in Parallel

The split-narrative device places Going Bicoastal in conversation with romantic comedies built around forking-path premises, but Adler uses the structure for more than novelty. By letting Natalya's attraction to a girl and her attraction to a boy exist in separate, equally weighted storylines, the book resists framing bisexuality as indecision or a phase to be resolved — both possibilities are given the same narrative seriousness, the same stakes, and the same care.

Underneath the romance, the book is also a story about parental estrangement and the effort of rebuilding trust with a parent who has been largely absent. That thread runs through both timelines regardless of which parent Natalya spends the summer with, suggesting that the harder relationship to sort out may not be the romantic one at all. Reviewers have noted the novel's blend of lighthearted voice and genuine emotional weight, a combination that has become a signature of Adler's work in queer YA romance.

Why Going Bicoastal Has Been Challenged

A complaint brought against the book argued that its dual storyline normalizes same-sex attraction for teenage readers by presenting a girl-centered romance as an equally valid, equally happy ending alongside a heterosexual one, and that this framing amounts to advocacy rather than storytelling. Related objections have focused on the book's romantic and physical content generally, contending that its handling of teenage intimacy — regardless of which pairing is involved — is too explicit for the age group that typically checks out YA titles from a school library.

Other criticism has been directed at the broader presence of LGBTQ+ characters and relationships in school collections, with some challengers arguing that such material belongs in a parental-guidance or opt-in category rather than on open shelves. Defenders of the book counter that its bisexual protagonist and the honesty of its family-repair storyline reflect experiences many teen readers recognize in their own lives. In the catalog tracked here, Going Bicoastal has been the subject of a formal challenge in one school district and a restriction recorded at the state level in one state.