Iksw - Blog Posts
“Who is she when, for once, no one is looking?”
- I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston
This book goes on sale tomorrow, and all I can say is that Casey is three for three on books that make me roll with laughter, choke up, and surge with hope. Unlike RWRB and OLS, Shara Wheeler is a YA novel, but it never underestimates its reader, delivering a plot that makes you just about as obsessed as Chloe is with the hunt for the missing prom queen, Shara. This story tackles religious conservativism, gender/sexual identity, the red state/blue state divide, among other themes, but the theme that spoke most to me was about truly seeing people as they are, as opposed to through the filter we unwittingly apply through a combination of social conditioning and our own hidden wounds.
For that reason, I painted Chloe seeing Shara through a looking glass. <3
I can’t recommend this one enough y’all. Grown-up readers: You will love it too! (I sure did!)
PS: Easter eggs abound….👀
Me reading chapter 1: Oh I bet Chloe is just being overdramatic and presumptuous and Shara is actually a nice girl with more depth than Chloe thinks
Me by chapter 12: Shara Wheeler is a vicious bitch and maybe a sociopath
Me by chapter 17: Oh they’re both batshit insane and they’re //perfect// for each other
Kissed and ditched by Shara Wheeler 💋💌
+ bonus Shara:
chloe green from i kissed shara wheeler concept art RAHHHH
edit: updated the picture to the revised vers. :)
chloe green and shara wheeler matched eachother’s freak
Red/blue pairings are beautiful but which one of you is the pink one and which one of you is the green one??
i love i kissed shara wheeler because
it allows the sapphic women characters to be flawed. i feel like that’s not as common in most wlw books. they are both batshit insane and obsessive.
academic rivals to lovers is actually the most entertaining shit in the world. youre competing for top of the class but also for each others attention. youre giving presentations in class and silently hoping they slip up just a little, forget part of what theyre meant to say, just so you can get a higher grade than them. theyre constantly on your mind & taking up brain space and you rationalize that away, call it hatred. you answer a question correctly in class a split second before they get the chance to and youre glad because you beat them to it but also because you know theyre looking at you
Casey McQuiston could very much have doubled down on that dollar and kept writing Alternate Universe - Politics m/m fanfic fusion type novels and instead they wrote a dyke time travel public sex 70s queer history infodump novel and a campy Southern private highschool overachiever rivals to mistrustful girlfriends YA novel and you know what I do respect it
Lacy by Olivia Rodrigo is the most Chloe Green and Shara Wheeler song ever
the CMQverse 🧣💋♥️
Shara @ Chloe:
[we were both on the google doc at the same time... wanna fuck?]
Chloe: Shara pretended to need help with math as part of an elaborate plot because she hates me.
Shara: I pretended to need help with math as part of an elaborate plot because I hate her.
Narrator: Shara did not hate her.
the megabitch of your dreams.
EVERY YEAR Casey McQuiston will write a silly little book and for the first 50 pages I’ll be like “oh I am going to be normal about this” and then I’ll stay up til 4 am on a school night reading the rest of it in on sitting. I even have the audacity to be surprised each time
she's never kissed anybody like this. she's glad it's shara. nobody else would have felt important enough.
+ character doodles
