Cheer Up

Love and Pompoms

paperback, 128 pages

Published Aug. 10, 2021 by Oni Press.

ISBN:
9781620109557

View on OpenLibrary

5 stars (3 reviews)

Annie is a smart, antisocial lesbian starting her senior year of high school who’s under pressure to join the cheerleader squad to make friends and round out her college applications. Her former friend BeeBee is a people-pleaser—a trans girl who must keep her parents happy with her grades and social life to keep their support of her transition. Through the rigors of squad training and amped up social pressures (not to mention micro aggressions and other queer youth problems), the two girls rekindle a friendship they thought they’d lost and discover there may be other, sweeter feelings springing up between them.

1 edition

The Teen Movie I've Been Waiting For

5 stars

Cheer Up reads like a classic movie about teens. There's a central conflict involving belonging and teamwork and romance and self-discovery in a high school, but instead of whatever the heck we had in the 80s and 90s we have protagonists who are queer/trans. This book isn't here to change the world or is about an agonizing coming out experience. It's a cute story about teenagers, one of whom just so happens to be taking puberty blockers. It's a story about the proper growing up experience that many of us never got to have and that many can have in a gentler world.

reviewed Cheer Up by Crystal Frasier

Thoughtful, meaningful, endearing. A short book with art that brings life to the characters so brilliantly 💖

5 stars

I got this from the library, read half of it on the way home then immediately sat and finished it, then ordered a copy from the local comic shop. Yesterday I picked up that copy and read it in one sitting, and I love it even more than I did before. I'm not someone who dismisses any sport out of hand but I'm also not your typical target market for a book about cheerleading, but also cheer is really only the structure on which the story is laid, and I am very much the target market for a story about people-pleasing trans girls and smart-but-grumpy lesbians rekindling a friendship, learning from each other and (spoiler, but not really) falling in love, so, there ya go.

It's not flawless (nothing is), but damn it is perfect. Crystal's writing is excellent - I love these characters so much, they're full of life …