Just Your Local Bisexual Disaster, by Andrea Mosqueda, follows Maggie Gonzalez, a bisexual girl who has to pick a date for her sister’s quinceñera, but is torn as she finds herself having feelings for three of her friends- Matthew (her ex-boyfriend), Amanda (her best friend), and Dani (the new, mysterious girl in the friend group). Throughout the book, she struggles to sort through her feelings for all through of them through a photography project for her art class.

I did really like Maggie as a protagonist. She was relatable (most of the time), even if she made so many bad decisions that it was a little painful to read sometimes. In addition to her indecision over her various crushes, she’s also worrying about her future; she’s a junior in high school, and had long been telling people that she wants to go to NYU for college, but now is doubting that dream due to the cost and the distance from home. She’s particularly concerned with how this will affect her relationship with her best friend, Amanda, whose dream school is Columbia, and for whom New York is a shared dream for the pair of them. Maggie loves photography, and wants to be a touring band photographer for a career, which was honestly one of the more interesting aspects of her character.

Frankly, I couldn’t get myself invested in the various love interests. If there were any that I shipped with Maggie, it would have to be Amanda, who has easily the most developed and interesting personality. Matthew’s main personality traits are daddy issues and a temper, while Dani is just a walking queer girl stereotype with no real personality. If I’d liked the love interests more, the love square wouldn’t have wore on me as much, but I really just couldn’t see what Maggie saw in any of them.

I did really enjoy Maggie’s relationship with her family; her mother and sisters are easily the most interesting secondary characters in the book, but they don’t get as much development and page time as I would have hoped. I’d honestly be interested in reading a separate book about either of the sisters.

It’s been a few weeks since I finished the book, and I’m still not really sure how I feel about the bisexuality rep in it.  On the one hand, I appreciate all of the other characters’ easy acceptance of it. I really enjoyed the way that the book discusses the way the aspect of the straight girl/queer girl friendship dynamic where the straight girl can often seem to be flirting with the queer girl, and how that’s something that both parties need to be aware of. I’m not wording it terribly well, but it is something that I very rarely see being discussed in books, so that was very much appreciated on my part.

On the other hand, I don’t love the idea of the book perpetuating the idea that being torn between three people is some sort of unique bisexual thing, since it felt to me like it was perpetuating the idea that all bi people are sluts; there are hundreds of books featuring straight girls torn between more than one guy, so why does the fact that this girl happens to be bisexual make it a bi thing? Additionally, it had a very stereotyped view of queer culture. It felt like basically every aspect of Maggie and Dani’s personalities revolved around a very uniform view of lesbian culture, which I didn’t love (again with the perpetuating stereotypes thing).

Overall, I did enjoy Just Your Local Bisexual Disaster. I really appreciated the casual bisexual representation, and the story itself is fun and engaging; it’s mostly just in the character dynamics that I found myself not enjoying the book. Overall, I’m giving it 4 stars, and would recommend it to any fan of contemporary YA books whose looking for some queer rep or complicated love-square dynamics.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free eARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.