Author: Skye Quinlan
What’s worse? Someone using your face for catfishing or realizing you actually do have a crush on the catfished girl?
Harper “Band Geek” McKinley just wants to make it through her senior year of marching band—and her Republican father’s presidential campaign. That was a tall order to start, but everything was going well enough until someone made a fake gay dating profile posing as Harper. The real Harper can’t afford for anyone to find out about the Tinder profile for three very important reasons:
1. Her mom is the school dean and dating profiles for students are strictly forbidden.2. Harper doesn’t even know if she likes anyone like that—let alone if she likes other girls.3. If this secret gets out, her father could lose the election, one she’s not sure she even wants him to win.
But upon meeting Margot Blanchard, the drumline leader who swiped right, Harper thinks it might be worth the trouble to let Margot get to know the real her.
With her dad’s campaign on the line, Harper’s relationship with her family at stake, and no idea who made that fake dating profile, Harper has to decide what’s more important to her: living her truth or becoming the First Daughter of America.
Forward March is my first novel by Skye Quinlan. I was really excited to read this story as it features characters in marching band. At my school, marching band has been a huge deal where there were tons of students who wanted to join, but not enough spaces. The main character in this story follows Harper McKinley who is a senior at a private boarding school. She plays saxophone in her school’s marching band, has asthma, and is allergic to seafood. All three are traits that are not usually included in many novels, especially a combination of all three. As someone with a seafood allergy, I never expected to read a story including it. Harper’s story follows her journey trying to deal with someone impersonating her on Tinder and swiping right with drumline leader, Margot Blanchard, when Harper is not out yet, along with going along with her dad’s Republican presidential campaign.
The political aspect of the novel ended up taking a lot more pages than I initially expected. While it does not go fully into politics, it does immediately have the reader assume that by mentioning her father is a Republican that he is not open to the LGBT+ community. There isn’t a lot of illustration to go into why Harper or the reader should disagree with the father or Republicans in general. It only mentions the political party and runs with the idea the reader automatically understands the situation. While I fully agree that this is the assumption for the party, I think there should have been more effort on the author’s part to show the readers why we shouldn’t agree with them. Especially, if this is a key part of the story.
As for the marching band portion, Harper spends a lot of time with the band and learning new songs. There were a lot of performances at football games, but it did not seem to go much further into the competitions. There were some highlights about band life and how Harper lives in this world, but it did not seem to go into it as much as I thought. There is a lot involved in marching band, so it was unexpected that the band in this novel seemed limited to random performances for the school.
The romance of the story was not the focus except to help move along the storyline for Harper to self-discover her own sexuality. Margot was a great addition to the story, and I greatly enjoyed her character, but I did not feel a lot of chemistry between them. I think this was due to the other storylines overshadowing this rather than it being just poorly written. Overall, this seemed to be the main problem of the novel where it tried to do too much, so each piece suffered. I think the story would have a greater impact by omitting the political aspect of the story. It still could have included conservative parents where Harper did not know how they would feel about her sexuality without adding in tons of page-time for all the political events. I think the core of Harper discovering more about herself was great, but it needed more focus to be amazing.
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