Three years ago, Lex Croucher made their YA debut with the very witty Gwen & Art Are Not In Love, a historical-ish romcom about a princess and a noble who have been betrothed their entire lives and cannot stand each other. When Gwen catches Art kissing a stable boy and Art discovers Gwen’s crush on Camelot’s only female knight, the two decide to play nice, then play wingman as they each court the people they are actually interested in, Gwen with her lady knight and Art with Gwen’s brother. In this year’s Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay, we return to Camelot, where lady knight Bridget and newly crowned King Gabriel take the lead.
Gwen & Art was one of my favorite books of 2023, so naturally this sequel was one of my most anticipated books of this year. Amazingly, I loved it just as much as I hoped I would. It was a perfect follow-up. People are understandably leery of surprise sequels to books that were written as standalones, but even the first time around, I felt like Gwen & Art left off with a lot of work still to be done. Without going into too much detail, their initial happily ever after came with a lot of trauma and what were clearly going to be uphill battles. Rather than feeling like needless conflict to justify a sequel, therefore, the events of this book felt like the logical continuation of the ending of the first book, both on a personal and a political scale.
The political nature of this book was surprisingly one of my favorite things about it. I don’t mean that in the sense that it had a lot of complex political maneuvering, because it didn’t really. What it had instead was queer teens (and adults) putting everything they had into making their world better and safer for people like them while the world around them tried to tell them they were doing too much too fast. Where the first book leaned a little further into optimistic escapism, Bridget & Gabe meets us right where we are and urges us to keep fighting.
That does mean this book was a lot less funny than the first one. The stakes are higher, and after everything that happened in the first book, none of these kids are in a great place mentally. On top of that, Bridget and Gabriel are both just less inclined to humor in general than Gwen and Arthur. Though I describe the first book as a romcom, I would not really consider Bridget & Gabe to be either a romance or a comedy. It is much more focused on Bridget and Gabe’s individual growth and mental health, with their respective romantic relationships taking a bit of a backseat to everything else they have going on. However, it didn’t feel like a departure or an absence. It still very much felt like the same world and the same author, and the humor that was present still worked. Where the first book made me laugh on every page, this book was more like every chapter. And the love, of course, was still there.
Maybe I’m biased because I love these characters so much I would read a five-book series of them just kind of hanging out, but I do think this sequel enhances the first book as well. It’s a reminder that change is never easy, and there will always be closed-minded people who will hate you for it, but it is still necessary and worth fighting for. I was so proud of them by the end, and I will treasure my time with them always.
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