I have started a book that is not by Ellen Klages.

Okay, so most books are not by Ellen Klages. This one is in fact by Robin Talley, who has written two other YA books I really like, What We Left Behind and Lies We Tell Ourselves.

This one, appropriately named Pulp*, is about lesbian pulp novels from the 1950s, with characters in the 1950s and characters in the present, and alternating stories, and stories within stories, and so it quite forcefully puts me in mind of Ellen Klages.**

So here’s the thing about Pulp: It has a LOT of characters. Possibly not more than other YA novels, but the book has so many pairs of lives in parallel, that…well, basically, I wanted a place to write all the names down. So here:

In the present we have Abby, a senior in high school, who’s pining after her ex-girlfriend Linh (now “just friends”), and who discovers, on the internet, a lesbian pulp novel by the elusive Marian Love, about a girl named Elaine who goes off to New York City and meets a girl named Paula in a bar in Greenwich Village. Abby, who’s into writing fanfic***, is enamored by the new genre and decides for her senior writing project to try her hand at a lesbian pulp novel (something ironic, to subvert the genre) about two girls named Gladys and Henrietta. And she tries to research — and maybe contact — Marian Love.

And in the 1950s there is Janet, a senior in high school, who’s pining after her best friend Marie (now graduated and with a new job), and who discovers, on a bus station wire rack, a lesbian pulp novel by the mysterious Dolores Wood, about two girls named Betty and Sam who meet each other in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Janet, who’s hoping to go to college and become a journalist, is stunned to see her feelings echoed anywhere outside her own head and decides to try her hand at writing a pulp novel of her own, very very secretly, about two girls named Elaine and Paula. Oh, and she tries to contact Dolores Wood.

And, just to be clear, there are excerpts included from all the books and manuscripts.

So. Just so we’ve gotten everything sorted out. Thank you.

I will now proceed with my reading.

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*Or, occasionally, Plup…

**For further reference see “Time Gypsy,” my favorite of her stories, which I read in the collection Portable Childhoods and which contains actual time travel, and her time-bouncing novel Passing Strange. She also has a series of middle grade historical novels: The Green Glass Sea; White Sands, Red Menace; and Out of Left Field. They’re all amazing, and I love that her MG books are very straightforward and sensible and yet manage to share worlds with her more fantastical and magical adult books.

***Oh, and just to be clear, Pulp has excerpts from more inlaid stories than Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl****; just saying…

****which is the book that left me wanting to read two series that didn’t exist, one of which was fanfic of the other. Of course, then the one actually got written, but it was kind of standalone and had some clear departures from the fanfic version, which was a bit…odd.