I was brought back in time by Rookie On Love, edited by Tavi Gevinson

Photo: Amazon

Rookie On Love is a book I got for Christmas in 2020, then proceeded to thoroughly ignore for the next two years. Its beautiful cover taunted me daily, but a mix of Kindle Unlimited reverse harem books and YA fantasy kept me entertained enough that I ended up forgetting about the book altogether.

Until last week.

I decided I had had enough of staring at screens and decided to both reorganize my shelf and give a physical book a chance again. I chose Rookie purely because I found myself in the mood to read short things, rather than commit to a full novel.

To give you context, Rookie On Love is a collection of essays, poems, art and comic strips from 45 authors, edited by Tavi Gevinson (blogger, writer, actress and founder/editor-in-chief of online magazine, Rookie). Back when it was still ongoing, Rookie was described as a magazine for teenagers, by teenagers, which I always thought was empowering in a way only adolescence can be. It includes some very interesting names amongst its authors, such as Gabourey Sidibe (actress), Emma Straub (writer), Florence Welch (lead singer of Florence and the Machine)  and Mitski Miyawaki (musician), aside from other contributors, including Rookie readers.

As its name suggests, all of the different pieces in this collection have one common theme: love, in all its forms. As a hopeless romantic, who also highly values reading about non-romantic love, I was curious to see how all of these different authors would add their own spin on the topic. 

And oh, what an experience it was. 

Reading this book made me feel thirteen years old again, when I once sat in my then-best friend’s room and we poured over two volumes of TigerBeat her aunt had brought us from the States (it’s worth noting that writing this review led me to find out TigerBeat is still going as an online magazine). It made me nostalgic for adolescence and possibilities and crushes that feel like true love and then become the best sort of memory.

My crush back then was named Daniel, and was also my best friend’s crush, something we never truly fought about because neither of us really had the courage to even speak to him. To be honest, I don’t really remember much about Daniel other than his name, but I remember the butterflies, and the fact that I arrived at school way too early, partially because he arrived at school way too early too. 

Of course, I was partial to some of the pieces over the others. I’m not much of a poetry girl (in spite of my attempt-at-songwriting phase), so I breezed through those with a little less interest than the essays, but still it didn’t deter my enjoyment of the book. 

My favorite essay of all had absolutely nothing to do with crushes or romance, though. In her essay, Mitsky talked about her love of music in a way that reminded me how thoroughly convinced I was that I would someday become an international rock star. It tugged at my heartstrings and reminded me that I met some of my oldest and dearest friends through music, and how it’s still a love filled with memories I deeply cherish in my heart.

I would also highlight Emma Straub’s contribution, as it speaks of her love of books (and lo’ and behold, this is a book blog). Though short, I really liked how Straub wrote about authors and the hint of humor that shone through in the essay. This one in particular solidified my wish to read The Vacationers, by Straub. Maybe you’ll see a review for it in this blog sometime (though that too might be subjected to a two-year delay). 

Overall I highly recommend this book. It connected me to my teenage self in a very warm, beautiful way, but also entertained the current me immensely. The essays are well written, diverse and interesting, the artwork is cool, and compliments the pieces beautifully and I liked the mix of formats, even if I prefer some of them over the others.