Kate in Waiting

Overview

Becky Albertalli's Kate in Waiting follows Kate Garfield and Anderson Walker, two inseparable theater kids who have spent years perfecting a system: they drive to rehearsal together, weigh in on each other's every decision, and even share crushes from a safe, unthreatening distance. The arrangement works precisely because none of those crushes ever amount to anything real.

That balance collapses when Matt Olsson, a boy both of them have quietly admired from afar, enrolls at their school and lands in their theater program. Kate finds herself drawn to him in a way that feels different from her usual half-serious infatuations, only to discover that Anderson feels the same pull. What had always been a harmless, shared joke suddenly has real stakes attached to it.

As rehearsals continue and the school production moves forward, Kate has to reckon with jealousy, loyalty, and the uncomfortable realization that a friendship built on total transparency may not survive an actual, competing desire.

Behind the Curtain: Friendship, Jealousy, and Growing Up

Much of Albertalli's fiction returns to the anxious, over-analyzed interior life of teenagers figuring out who they are in relation to the people around them, and Kate in Waiting continues that pattern by turning the lens on friendship rather than romance alone. The novel treats Kate and Andy's closeness as its own kind of relationship, one with its own rules, jealousies, and unspoken expectations, and asks what happens when those rules stop working.

The backstage setting gives the story a natural structure: rehearsals, performances, and the rhythms of a school theater program mirror the characters' own need to rehearse conversations and perform confidence they don't always feel. Read alongside Albertalli's earlier work, the book fits a broader interest in how teenagers narrate their own lives to themselves, often unreliably, before arriving at a more honest account of what they actually want.

Why Kate in Waiting Has Been Challenged

Concerns about sexual content and frank discussion of teenage attraction sit at the center of most objections to this novel. Reviewers who have pushed for its removal point to passages depicting romantic and physical interest between the teenage characters, along with casual references to sex and body image, as inappropriate for the middle and high school audiences who typically encounter it on library shelves.

Language has also drawn scrutiny, with some challengers citing profanity used by the characters in dialogue as unsuitable for younger readers. In addition, the book's inclusion of LGBTQ characters and storylines, consistent with Albertalli's other novels, has prompted objections from those who argue that school and library collections should limit material addressing sexual orientation and gender identity for adolescent readers. Within this catalog, the book has been the subject of formal challenges in 1 state and 3 districts, brought primarily on these grounds.