Going Viral: A Socially Distant Love Story

Overview

Katie Cicatelli-Kuc's novel follows Claire Draper, a New York City junior whose world contracts to the size of her apartment when a global pandemic forces her family into lockdown. Cut off from her girlfriend Vanessa and the rhythms of ordinary high school life, Claire turns to the one window she still has on the world outside: literally, the window of her bedroom, through which she spots a girl sitting on a fire escape across the street.

From that small observation, Claire begins writing an anonymous online story imagining a romance between two girls separated by nothing more than a city block. When her fiction unexpectedly catches fire online, readers start treating it as a true account rather than an invented one, and Claire finds herself caught between the identity she has built on the page and the relationship she is still trying to protect in real life.

What begins as a private creative outlet becomes a test of how much of herself Claire is willing to reveal, and to whom, as the attention her story draws threatens to outpace her ability to control it.

A Pandemic Story About Connection and Self-Invention

Set against the early, disorienting months of a worldwide health crisis, the novel uses isolation as more than a backdrop; it becomes the condition that pushes Claire toward storytelling in the first place. The book sits within a wave of pandemic-era young adult fiction that tried to capture how physical distance reshaped friendship, romance, and identity for teenagers who came of age online. Cicatelli-Kuc layers that historical moment with a coming-out narrative and a meditation on internet fame, asking what happens when a fictional version of a relationship becomes more visible, and in some ways more believable to strangers, than the real one. The tension between Claire's private life with Vanessa and her public persona as an anonymous author gives the novel its central question: how do you stay honest with the people closest to you when an audience is rewarding you for blurring the line between fact and invention?

Why Going Viral Has Been Challenged

Much of the dispute surrounding this title centers on whether its subject matter belongs on shelves accessible to younger readers, rather than on whether it should be available at all. Because the novel centers a same-sex teen relationship and treats it with the same emotional and physical candor applied to heterosexual romances in other young adult fiction, some objectors have characterized its content as inappropriate for school-age audiences. Challenges have also pointed to the book's handling of adolescent sexuality and relationship intimacy more broadly, arguing that scenes depicting physical closeness between the teenage characters exceed what they consider suitable for a school or library setting. Other critics have framed their concerns around the normalization of LGBTQ+ identities in material marketed to teenagers, rather than isolating specific passages. Within this catalog, the book has been the subject of 2 state-level and 3 district-level challenges, reflecting a broader pattern in which stories centering queer teen romance draw scrutiny disproportionate to similarly themed stories about heterosexual couples.