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Right Beside You

by Tucker Shaw

A camera opens a door to New York’s queer past

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AlbakiReads Editorial

A camera opens a door to New York’s queer past

After high school, Eddie leaves his Colorado town to help his great-aunt Cookie in Greenwich Village. Her vintage Polaroid camera sends him into New York’s early-20th-century past, where he encounters the underground queer life of the 1930s and Francis, a boy who captures his attention. In the present, Eddie meets Theo, a baker, as he begins to question what he wants from love and from the future. The two timelines connect a coming-of-age story with a speculative device, placing Eddie’s emerging sense of identity alongside a choice between romantic possibility in the past and a relationship in his own time.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Teens and young adults interested in queer coming-of-age fiction
  • Readers who enjoy speculative stories involving time shifts
  • Readers interested in romances set across past and present New York

Themes

Queer identityComing of ageRomanceMemory and historyChoosing a future

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

"Deeply moving and thoroughly engrossing." --Kirkus, starred review

In this fresh, speculative blend of queer romance and coming-of-age, Eddie meets Theo in present-day New York and Francis in a New York of the past... torn between eras and his heart, he must make a decision that will change his life forever.


High school has just ended and Eddie is at a loss for what's next. He had a falling out with his best friend, and he never really related to the rest of his peers in the sleepy Colorado town he calls home. The future is bleak.

Until his ancient and eccentric great aunt Cookie asks him to care for her in New York City as she recuperates from an illness. Eddie leaps at the opportunity. Soon after he arrives at her tiny Greenwich Village apartment, homebound Cookie asks Eddie to use her vintage polaroid camera to snap pictures of her favorite places she can no longer visit. But something's unusual about this camera. When he takes a photo, he's launched back in time to an entirely different New York of the early 20th century.

As Eddie explores the underground queer life of the 1930s, he discovers new undercurrents of his own identity. Not to mention a dangerously handsome boy in scuffed boots and tattered stovepipe trousers who keeps popping up in his visions of the past.

But when Eddie begins to develop a crush on the mercurial Francis, a cute baker named Theo enters the picture--and he's in the present. Caught between timelines and feelings, Eddie must make a decision about what he's willing to chase: his romantic fantasies of the past or a reality that might just be what he's wanted all along.

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