Content notes for: nudity, sex, and one Blue is the Warmest Colour style short story featuring under age age gap fling with cheating.

What kinds of keywords came to mind? Lesbians, obviously, coming of age, slice of life, romance, and boarding schools.

"On Loving Women is a new collection of stories about coming out, first love, and sexual identity by the animator Diane Obomsawin. With this work, Obomsawin brings her gaze to bear on subjects closer to home—her friends' and lovers' personal accounts of realizing they're gay or first finding love with another woman. Each story is a master class in reaching the emotional truth of a situation with the simplest means possible. Her stripped-down pages use the bare minimum of linework to expressively reveal heartbreak, joy, irritation, and fear."

The art style was interesting, and fits with the genre, but it was not really my favourite.

Gender and sexuality were obviously pretty central to this collection of short stories. Apparently Obomsawin interviewed a number of people she knew across a wide age range, but since she chose to focus more on each person's first lesbian relationship all the stories feature fairly young protagonists. I was a bit concerned about the lack of trans representation, as I'm not sure if this was an oversight or a deliberate exclusion. An alibi fairly cursory searches via duck duck go did not appear to reveal anything, but Obomsawin does not appear to be a terribly online person either.

Similarly, racial diversity seemed to be largely ignored. But living in a still pretty segregated society, it's not hard to believe that since Obomsawin was drawing from her personal contacts there could just not be much diversity to draw on. That said, I'm not sure if the different animal heads Obomsawin uses was supposed to denote racial different? So there is a chance it just flew right over my head.

Class did feel like one of the things that did really differentiate some of the characters from each other.

And, again, might have missed something but the assumption seemed to be that everyone was pretty able bodied.

So yeah, to conclude, I am glad I finally got around to reading this book as it's been on my TBR for what feels like forever. That said, as I already mentioned, not a new favourite. I have been feeling very unnerved by my ratings of late though, always feeling like I'm rating things to highly or to lowly. So let us see... I think I'm going to follow my gut and start with a two out of five stars, which always feels harsh, but it was OK so there's that.