A Safe Girl to Love
Description
A new edition of the acclaimed debut story collection by two-time Lambda Literary Award winner Casey Plett.
By the author of Little Fish and A Dream of a Woman:eleven unique short stories featuring young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love in settings ranging from a rural Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn. These stories, shiny with whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never will it be predictable.
A Safe Girl to Love, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction, was first published in 2014. Now back in print after a long absence, this new edition includes an afterword by the author.
Reviews
Casey Plett's stories are exquisite, riveting, transformative, reasonably pissed off and joyously and riskily generous in the audience they imagine. -Trish Salah, author of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1 and Wanting in Arabic
Plett's stories show kindness at the same time as they show clear-eyed judgment, both of which we need. She writes beautifully about dressing rooms, balcony plants, house parties, the paramount importance of keeping your obligations to your cats. She takes us into the knot of really accurately rendered bonds of old friendships, families, queer solidarities, and she shows us how we can live there. -Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun and The Black Emerald
An astounding debut by an original new literary voice.
-Zoe Whittall, author of The Spectacular and The Best Kind of People
Her prose is reminiscent of Lorrie Moore and Miriam Toews, but there is both a tenderness and a willingness to confront bleak truths in Plett's writing that is all her own. I love this book. -Imogen Binnie, author of Nevada
A new edition of Plett's debut collection resurfaces 11 thoughtful stories exploring the lives of young trans women as they attempt to carve out space for themselves, set often in Canada and the Pacific Northwest ... A Safe Girl to Love is driven by deeply human, sometimes humorous, but always exquisitely rendered details. -Kirkus Reviews
Lambda winner Plett (Little Fish) made her debut with this impressive collection, which now returns to print ... Plett has a knack for cracking open her characters' messy, conflicted feelings with punchy lines, as in "A Carried Ocean Breeze," when the narrator reflects on her and her friends: "I don't want to be brave. I want us to be okay." These character studies are thoughtful and gorgeous. -Publishers Weekly
Casey Plett's stories pack an emotional punch that lingers after you shut the book. -PRISM international