Abbie Sokoloff is a fictional high school senior and one of two lead characters in Brianna R. Shrum and Sara Waxelbaum’s YA romance Margo Zimmerman Gets the Girl. Abbie is an openly bi swimmer, tomboy, and skateboarder. She’s funny, sarcastic, and confident — and taken aback when the titular character Margo Zimmerman approaches her after swim practice and announces, “You’re gay.”
Which is true, Abbie notes, but a strange thing to announce to her after practice. Only after pushing does Abbie get the full truth: Margo is looking for someone to teach her about queerness, because she has only just realized that she’s a lesbian. She’s asking Abbie because Abbie has been out for ages; she seems chill and confident like she has everything in her life under control.
What Margo doesn’t know is that this is pretty far from the truth: Abbie is struggling with her distant and neglectful parents, her grade in AP History, and, now, the fact that Florida International University is threatening to rescind Abbie’s acceptance if she doesn’t get her GPA up. Trading Queer 101 lessons for AP History tutoring seems like a fair trade, so Abbie agrees to help Margo, much to Margo’s surprise.
As the two spend more and more time together, though, the line between “business exchange” and “actual, real-life friends” begins to blur. They start to become something more in fits and starts. Margo isn’t out to everyone yet, and she struggles to figure out when — and if — she should tell her friends the truth. Abbie’s life is complicated by her best friend, a lesbian named Charlie, who isn’t particularly supportive of Abbie’s bisexuality. Though Charlie is very kind about other parts of Abbie’s life, she insists on reducing Abbie to only her queer relationships, leaving Abbie unsure of how to proceed in their friendship.
Margo Zimmerman Gets the Girl mixes tropes like friends to lovers, fish out of water, and will they, won’t they. It addresses themes of self-worth, biphobia, setting boundaries, and coming of age. It tackles reductive stereotypes, such as the cliché that all lesbians have to be butch or masc, and it often utilizes sarcasm and wry humor to offset some of the heavier material. The novel explores relationships, communication, and the feeling of being on a precipice, with everything about to change—whether that “everything” is high school graduation, growing up, or coming out.
In terms of bi representation, Abbie is out before the start of the novel. She regularly uses the word “bisexual” to describe herself, as well as “gay” and “queer”. She has dated and/or hooked up with enbies, women, and men — which, she notes wryly, makes her sound a bit like the greedy bi stereotype. The novel’s understanding of stereotypes, and how Abbie both fits them sometimes and doesn’t fit them other times, leads to in-depth conversations, in the novel itself, about biphobia and the stereotypes that bi folk face.
As such, themes of bisexuality are at the forefront of Margo Zimmerman Gets the Girl. Much of Abbie’s arc addresses biphobia and bi erasure, and Abbie herself has hard conversations with multiple characters regarding their assumptions about her due to her sexuality. Though these conversations are undeniably difficult, they teach Abbie the importance of standing up for herself, setting boundaries, and living her truth.