Ashleigh Walker, at 17, has dated the occasional boy in her high school in England, but never anyone special. "[B]oys are, well, they're OK, but they're not everything. As soon as I start going out with someone, I seem to lose interest in them." But while preparing for final exams, dealing with friend troubles and processing her parents' imminent divorce, "Ash" does start feeling interest--intense, backflipping-stomach interest--for someone. Shockingly for her, it's not her "completely bloody gorgeous" new boyfriend, Dylan, but her fresh-out-of-college, Philip Larkin-quoting, Wuthering Heights-loving English teacher, Miss Murray, who inspires these feelings. Ash, who is wry and smart but hardly academically inclined, even starts looking forward to class ("What the hell is that about?" she wonders). Something entirely new and unsettling is stirring in her: she says of her teacher, "I think she's like a switch that turns an old grainy black-and-white film into vibrant color. I think she wakes me up."
British author Liz Kessler (North of Nowhere; A Year Without Autumn; the Emily Windsnap series) wrote Read Me Like a Book in the early 2000s, when many U.K. publishers were still skittish about coming-of-age novels with gay protagonists. Luckily for the reading world, Kessler tucked it away safely for a future when readers would not only tolerate a funny, honest, bittersweet story of coming out, but clamor for it. Ash is authentic as a teen for whom light and love dawneth simultaneously. And Miss Murray is spectacular in her role as a teacher-guide who must walk the delicate line between support and inappropriateness. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor