Right Beside You

Starred review from February 15, 2025
A queer teenager toggles between eras in this time-fluid love story. Eighteen-year-old Eddie is new to New York City. He's there tending to Cookie, his 99-year-old great-aunt who lives in Greenwich Village. Her home is an homage to the past: Photos from her youth adorn the walls, as well as portraits of glamorous movie stars, like Bette Davis and Tallulah Bankhead. Eddie's responsibilities include taking photos with Cookie's vintage Polaroid camera of her favorite haunts, picking up opera cakes and alstroemerias, and having a glass of sherry with Cookie at precisely 4:00 p.m. All of this is manageable. What's not manageable is Eddie's anxiety. As he explores the city, he meets Theo, the bakery apprentice who makes said opera cakes. But Eddie is unable to move forward with his feelings of attraction. He also meets Francis, a boy from the 1920s. As Eddie slips between then and now, he's able to fully be himself with Francis; their love story is sweet, hot, and revelatory. But is it real? Is Eddie's seeming ability to travel through time actually something else? This story is a love letter to New York, an exploration of identity, and the passing down of a legacy of queer stories from one generation to another. Eddie's visions are left open for readers' interpretation, but his search for where he belongs is very clear, resplendent in how vividly Shaw conveys it. Most characters are cued white. Deeply moving and thoroughly engrossing.(Fiction. 14-18)

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Starred review from April 1, 2025
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* Released from the hospital, 18-year-old Eddie's great-great-aunt Cookie summons him to New York to take care of her. He finds the 99-year-old to be a latter-day Auntie Mame type, and when she sends Eddie on errands, she equips him with an ancient Polaroid camera to take pictures so she can see what's happening in the city she loves. One of these errands takes him to the fabled Algonquin Hotel, where he finds himself transported back in time to 1930. There, he discovers his waiter is the beautiful boy whose picture hangs on his bedroom wall and whom he will see several more times as he is again transported to the past--until the boy finally introduces himself as Francis. Eddie falls in love with him as he takes the boy to a gay speakeasy, a gay ball, and elsewhere in 1930. Meanwhile, in the present on another errand, Eddie meets a young baker, Theo, and finds himself attracted to him, too. Shaw's splendid novel offers long thoughts about time and the nature of reality as it tells a compelling love story that is beautifully written in the omniscient narrator's voice, which is used to speak directly to Eddie ("Don't fall in, Eddie. Don't panic"). Don't miss this lovely book.

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Starred review from March 28, 2025

Gr 9 Up-There has always been something magical about New York City to Eddie, and when his great aunt Cookie requests his live-in assistance after a hospital stay, he agrees without reservation. Once Eddie arrives, the eccentric Cookie begins asking him to run errands with one unusual component: he is to use an old-fashioned camera to capture the personality of the location of each errand. Acquiescing to the housebound Cookie's request, Eddie soon finds the camera plunging him into the history of New York City-and an exploration of his own queer identity. Above all else, Shaw has crafted a love letter to queer New York in episodic vignettes presented almost in slideshow form; Eddie's forays into the past bring to light snippets of queer history that have largely been buried in the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic. The writing itself is dreamlike and creates the picture of a New York that exists in a uniquely liminal space where it only makes sense for a camera to drop Eddie seemingly randomly into everyday moments in history. While this is not for the impatient reader, as the plot unfolds slowly and without notable twists, the book is ultimately rewarding. VERDICT A precious celebration of queer joy, resistance, and community; a deserved first selection for any well-rounded collection.-Austin Ferraro

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