Annie on My Mind is a sensitively written novel of an adolescent girl's discovery of her homosexuality. Through a relationship with another girl she meets at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the main character, Eliza, experiences a romantic attraction marked by fear, guilt, hesitance, and regret for the negative effect on her family. Along with romantic love, her feelings also engender not a small amount of denial.The pervasive theme throughout this book is love---love that seeks to justify itself, in spite of the fact that every civilization since the dawn of mankind has recognized such love as ruinous to family stability and individual happiness.Lesbian attraction is, of course, not the only dysfunctional behavior that has sought to justify itself through its association with romanticism. Adulterous affairs, sexual liaisons between adults and children, the masochistic attraction to some people to abusive lovers, and many other dysfunctional relationships demand justification simply for love's sake.Nevertheless it is love that ostensibly carries the day, through the persecution that Eliza and her family are forced to undergo at the hands of the administrators of her private school, and the cruel attitudes of some of her fellow students.Any intelligent and compassionate reader would be put off by such scapegoating of homosexuals---but alas, tolerance does not necessarily call for approval, and this is what the author expects from the reader. The condemnation which Eliza is subjected to is obviously wrong-headed and pointless. However the emotional and psychological roots of her homosexuality (which could provide a compassionate source of understanding through counseling) were never touched upon--leaving the reader to believe, one supposes, that there is no developmental difference between the homosexual and heterosexual personality.It is this aspect that makes this book so beguilingly destructive. So much sensitivity of emotion, such affectionate yearning--how could anything be wrong?Any therapist who has ever helped an unhappy homosexual reorient his or her life . . . any former homosexual that has been disillusioned by gay life and transcended the painful process of change . . . would be able to tell Ms. Garden what is wrong. Homosexuality does not work because it contradicts one of the basic conditions for the survival of humanity, and thwarts the potential of profound happiness that heterosexual love carries: namely, that men and women were made for each other---physically, emotionally, and spiritually.(Reviewed By Thomas Gregory)
