Nat and Cami's Guide to Running an Undercover GSA

Casey McQuiston meets Heartstopper in this sapphic young adult debut romance.
Cami is a 15-year-old lesbian, one of the few out queer students at her conservative boarding school for international students in Italy. She just wants to focus on getting her paintings in a student gallery and kickstarting a vaunted art career—but first, she’ll have to survive the next two-and-a-half years of bullying. Seeking respite from her roommate’s cruelty one night, she hides out in a bathroom—only she’s not the only one there.

Nat is a senior, closeted even from herself, whose homophobic, missionary parents are pressuring her to win valedictorian. A year younger than her peers at 16, she’s still the head of her class, the fastest runner on the cross country team, and the captain of the girls’ soccer team, but her depression and insomnia keep her up all night. She takes refuge in the ground-floor bathroom where Cami shows up one night.

As they spend time together over the following nights and Cami shows Nat how poorly the school treats queer people, the two girls concoct a mildly hare-brained scheme: to create an undercover Genders & Sexualities Alliance (GSA) where queer students and allies can bond. They don’t expect so many kids to find a home with them.

And they certainly don’t expect to fall for each other.