Perfect for fans of:
- Fence
- Check, Please
- Heartstopper
- The Prince and the Dressmaker
Review:
Your best bet of getting me invested in any sort of sports-related book? Make it queer. It’s really that simple. Cheer Up moves in the beautifully populated ranks of Fence, Check, Please, and Heartstopper and provides some much-needed diverse representation!
Cheer Up: Love and Pompons is a heartfelt, quick-paced, sweet, and super diverse graphic novel. Though it’s pretty short, it managed to pack a lot within those pages—from diverse representation, a sapphic love story (with the unbeatable trope best-friends-to-enemies-to-friends-to-lovers) to representations of transphobic microaggressions and teammates becoming friends for life. I never had the feeling that topics were rushed or dropped completely, and they all tied in really well together towards the end.
I loved the juxtaposition of Annie, who’s super antisocial and has a lot of anger bottled up inside of her, with BeeBee who is an absolute people pleaser—recently transitioned, she thinks that she has to keep everyone happy in order for them to still support her. This means that a lot of the times, she says yes to things when she’s already overwhelmed and overworked. When these two former friends find their way back to each other through cheerleading, all bets are off and I loved how they both helped each other feel accepted and loved in this book.
BeeBee puts a lot of pressure on herself but she also faces transphobic microaggressions from her team— you can tell they only mean well, but sometimes that makes speaking up about being uncomfortable even harder. I enjoyed how supportive BeeBee’s cheerleader squad was and how they stood up for her, even when they didn’t get it right on their first try.
And can we talk for a second about the representation of DIFFERENT body shapes when it comes to cheerleaders? My heart was cheering when I saw multiple plus-sized characters on the squad! No one makes a comment about them not being able to do the pyramid or having to lose weight to stay on the team. They are just as able to slay as cheerleaders as everyone else on the team and you wouldn’t believe how healing that kind of representation can be.
Dealing with current social topics without sacrificing its lightheartedness, Cheer Up: Love and Pompoms is the perfect boost of girl power!
Cheer Up: Love and Pompoms is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of August 10th 2021.
Will you be picking up Cheer Up: Love and Pompoms? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
A sweet, queer teen romance perfect for fans of Fence and Check, Please!
Annie is a smart, antisocial lesbian starting her senior year of high school who’s under pressure to join the cheerleader squad to make friends and round out her college applications. Her former friend BeeBee is a people-pleaser—a trans girl who must keep her parents happy with her grades and social life to keep their support of her transition. Through the rigors of squad training and amped up social pressures (not to mention micro aggressions and other queer youth problems), the two girls rekindle a friendship they thought they’d lost and discover there may be other, sweeter feelings springing up between them.
