Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden (All Editions)

Annie on My Mind, written by Nancy Garden, is the story of Liza Winthrop is seventeen, president of the student council at Foster Academy, a small private school in Brooklyn Heights that needs every dollar of its fundraising drive. She’s headed for MIT to study architecture. Annie Kenyon goes to a crowded public school across the river in Manhattan and wants to be a singer. They meet by chance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and what starts as an easy friendship turns, over the following months, into something neither girl has a name for at first, and then into love.

Two of Liza’s teachers, a couple who have quietly shared a house for years, ask her to feed their cats over spring break. The empty house gives Liza and Annie a place of their own. When they are discovered there, the school puts everyone on trial: the teachers’ careers, Liza’s place at Foster, and the fundraising drive the headmistress will protect at any cost.

Genre: YA Fiction (Young Adult)

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Comment

Annie on My Mind is one of the first lesbian young adult novels with an unequivocally happy ending. The American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Award committee went further and said Nancy Garden has the distinction of being the first author for young adults to create a lesbian love story with a positive ending. Garden herself described looking in vain for books about her people while growing up as a young lesbian in the 1950s. The novel was her answer to that absence. Earlier books for teenagers that touched on gay and lesbian lives tended to end in punishment, loss or silence, and Annie broke that pattern.

The book was recognized quickly. It was selected for the 1982 Booklist Reviewer’s Choice, the 1982 ALA Best Books list, and the ALA Best of the Best lists for 1970 to 1983. School Library Journal later placed it among the 100 most influential books of the 20th century. In 2003 the ALA gave Garden the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime contribution to young adult literature, and the citation named Annie alone. In 2014 the Golden Crown Literary Society gave it the Lee Lynch Classic Award, citing it as one of the most important classics in lesbian literature.

Its history also includes a landmark censorship fight. In 1993 the LGBT organization Project 21 donated copies to 42 high schools in the Kansas City area. Copies were burned in Kansas City. Superintendent Ron Wimmer of the Olathe School District then ordered the book removed from the high school library. In March 1994 the American Civil Liberties Union sued the district on behalf of seven students and their parents. The case became Case v. Unified School District No. 233, a challenge to removing the book from the school libraries. In December 1999 the district announced it would not appeal the court’s decision and restored the book to library shelves, after a proceeding that cost it more than $160,000. Garden received an intellectual freedom award for her work defending the novel against the attempted ban. The book has never gone out of print.

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