Annie on my mind / Nancy Garden.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This groundbreaking book, first published in 1982, is the story of two teenage girls whose friendship blossoms into love and who, despite pressures from family and school that threaten their relationship, promise to be true to each other and their feelings.

From the moment Liza Winthrop meets Annie Kenyon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she knows there is something special between them. But Liza never knew falling in love could be so wonderful . . . or so confusing.

Of the author and the book, the Margaret A. Edwards Award committee said, "Nancy Garden has the distinction of being the first author for young adults to create a lesbian love story with a positive ending. Using a fluid, readable style, Garden opens a window through which readers can find courage to be true to themselves."

The 25th Anniversary Edition features a full-length interview with the author by Kathleen T. Horning, Director of the Cooperative Children's Book Center. Ms. Garden answers such revealing questions as how she knew she was gay, why she wrote the book, censorship, and the book's impact on readers - then and now.

"No single work has done more for young adult LGBT fiction than this classic about two teenage girls who fall in love." -- School Library Journal

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Garden's exceptionally well-rendered tale concerns two teenage girls who fall in love with each other. Ages 14-up. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

Gr 9 Up-Published more than 25 years ago, Nancy Garden's moving and poignant love story (Farrar, 1982) still rings true today. Liza and Annie, both 17 and attending different high schools, meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and fall in love. Narrator Rebecca Lowman touchingly brings their story to life as they discover each other and the harsh and confusing realities that surround them. The teens face uncertain feelings and questions about their emotional and physical relationship. Told in the third person and through letters Liza is trying to write to Annie after they both are at college, Lowman does a fine job portraying the girls' emotions as well as the stark reactions that the other characters have toward them when their relationship is discovered. With quietly distinct voices and subtle pacing that matches perfectly the unfolding of the young romance, this audiobook will stand the test of time. Listeners will be swept up by and find themselves fully immersed in the story. Margaret Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award winner Nancy Garden is featured in an interview at the end of the book. A must-have for all GLBTQ collections.-Stephanie A. Squicciarini, Fairport Public Library, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Garden¿s novel, first published in 1982, has become a classic of young-adult literature: the first lesbian love story. Pre-Annie, YA novels with GLBTQ content had treated homosexuality as little more than a problematic form of sexual expression. Garden changed all that by dramatizing the part that love plays in the burgeoning relationship between her teenage protagonists, Liza and Annie. Meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the two girls experience an instant kinship, a feeling that gradually and believably develops into something more emotionally multilayered and complex. Circumstances at Liza¿s school conspire to destroy the girls¿ partnership, but the resulting happy ending (another first for its time) seems unforced and deeply gratifying in its demonstration that sometimes love-not ignorance-can win. Though, in retrospect, parts of the novel may seem melodramatic and the treatment of its antagonists a bit one-dimensional, the emotional content remains vividly realized, authentic, and relevant to the questioning hearts of today¿s teens. This novel earned Garden the 2003 Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement in Young Adult Literature."--"Cart, Michael" Copyright 2007 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Talk about meeting cute! Liza first comes across Annie singing in a window at the Metropolitan Museum's American Wing. ""I was pretending that I was a Colonial girl who missed England,"" Annie explains. Then in the Hall of Armor Annie prances as if on horseback ("'Oh--look' she exclaimed. . . . 'Oh! they're wonderful!'"), and soon "we were both hopping in and out of the procession of knights, laying about with our imaginary swords and shouting chivalrous insults at each other." The two girls fall in love, and though Liza holds back for a while, eventually become lovers. Meanwhile back at Liza's stuffy private school in Brooklyn Heights, where she is student council president, she has a silly run-in with the overstrict headmistress for failing to report another girl's ear-piercing session. These two worlds come together when a pair of women teachers go off on vacation, Liza is hired to feed their cats, she and Annie take to hanging out at their house, and another teacher finds them together there, "practically in flagrante delicto." She also finds the double bed and shelf of books, evidence that the two teachers are lesbians as well. There's a trial at school, and though the board eventually declares Liza's behavior her own business, the two teachers are dismissed. Liza, who has half-lied to her parents about the affair, broods for months as a freshman at MIT, but finally accepts her love for Annie and plans a Christmas-vacation reunion. It's a soupy romance, with corny encounters and less-than-subtle characterization of all concerned. As a YA problem novel (the problem being social attitudes, not the relationship), it's par for the times, an ideological step beyond those reassurances that one such experience doesn't seal your destiny. The old bats at school, stereotypes that they are, at least provide some action. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.