My kind of story, about outsiders bonding over music, set in the time of my childhood, soaked in the stuff that science fiction promises of how things could be better if only. While I wasn’t bothered by its focus on gender, I did feel like Miller did a bit of time travel there by importing the language and issues of 2020 into the mid 1980s. Or perhaps this is an alternative Earth, where those issues emerged earlier? However, I’m surprised Miller was able to publish this, given the use of lyrics to both Iggy Pop and David Bowie songs.
Review of 'Let All the Children Boogie' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
A beautiful short, set in September 1991 with two 16yo protagonists in a small town in America — one non-binary, the other female and maybe queer?
It probably helps that I too was a queer 16yo in a small town in 1991 and Miller's choice of tracks, as well as this being a hopeful queer tale.
“The future is written, you might say. What will be will be. What’s the point of this? But so many futures are written. An infinite number, in fact. A billion trillion ways your story could end. I want to make sure you end up with the right future.”
As some of the more negative reviewers note, there are some points that don't quite hit — I'm pretty sure that permanent sense of impending doom was passing once the Wall had fallen, poets and trades unionists become presidents and Ceauşescu been executed, let alone the …
A beautiful short, set in September 1991 with two 16yo protagonists in a small town in America — one non-binary, the other female and maybe queer?
It probably helps that I too was a queer 16yo in a small town in 1991 and Miller's choice of tracks, as well as this being a hopeful queer tale.
“The future is written, you might say. What will be will be. What’s the point of this? But so many futures are written. An infinite number, in fact. A billion trillion ways your story could end. I want to make sure you end up with the right future.”
As some of the more negative reviewers note, there are some points that don't quite hit — I'm pretty sure that permanent sense of impending doom was passing once the Wall had fallen, poets and trades unionists become presidents and Ceauşescu been executed, let alone the failure of the Soviet August coup, which I remember as bringing a sense of hope. That an early-90s small town teen would have had understood well enough to gloss over parental misgendering of a non-binary friend was not one of those points, though; I feel sorry for cis-het readers who can expand their imagination to time-travelling radio interference but not to a queer teenager's perspective on the world in the embers of the Cold War.
CN: abusive parent, mention of alcoholism and transphobia
—that’s why I’m doing this, I guess. To tell you the future can be more magnificent, and more terrifying, than what you have in your head right now. And the one you embrace will be the one you end up with.
This story is supposed to be set in the 1990s; for some reason, it felt like something from at least a decade earlier for me, apart from the bits that felt all too modern. In a way, this anachronistic vibe actually works well for the subject matter. But it also creates a weird feeling of detachment.
Overall, though, I really liked it. I feel like it captures teenagehood well: that special period where everything is beautiful and tragic, where big revelations happen in a matter of moments and connections that feel like they have already lasted for eternity form even faster. The time of sleepless nights and those special …
—that’s why I’m doing this, I guess. To tell you the future can be more magnificent, and more terrifying, than what you have in your head right now. And the one you embrace will be the one you end up with.
This story is supposed to be set in the 1990s; for some reason, it felt like something from at least a decade earlier for me, apart from the bits that felt all too modern. In a way, this anachronistic vibe actually works well for the subject matter. But it also creates a weird feeling of detachment.
Overall, though, I really liked it. I feel like it captures teenagehood well: that special period where everything is beautiful and tragic, where big revelations happen in a matter of moments and connections that feel like they have already lasted for eternity form even faster. The time of sleepless nights and those special songs on the radio and the smell of smoke in the air. The time when you know you're going to live forever; when you know you can disappear any moment.
When I was a teen—when I was lost and confused and vaguely in love—I used to feel like the person who was most precious to me back then and I went to sleep every night on the opposite ends of our city, holding hands. These two characters' connection born out of listening to the same radio station reminded me of that. It's a good memory.
