A restrained, humane portrait of first love shaped by secrecy, faith, and quiet resistance.
Fritsch explores first love in a 1950s rural village where desire must move quietly to survive under a minister’s suspicious gaze. When high school classmates Ethan Tull and Reed Hauser fall in love, they must keep their relationship hidden from Ethan’s father, the rigid, homophobic minister of their village’s only church, whose moral absolutism threatens the refuge they struggle to create.
Eschewing melodrama, the story builds emotional force through accumulation—of secrecy, small freedoms, and quiet defiance in a tightly governed 1950s world. Much of the novella’s strength lies in its contrast between households. Reed’s family models a quiet, practical tolerance rooted in labor and respect for privacy, while Reverend Isaac Tull’s authoritarian faith curdles into control, hypocrisy, and a fixation that exposes repression as cruelty.
The moonshine cabin works as the novella’s defining symbol. With roots in Prohibition-era illegality, the cabin is repurposed as a hard-earned sanctuary in which acts labeled sinful are reclaimed as affirming and human. Perpetually vulnerable yet resolutely defended, it becomes a site where intellectual companionship and erotic discovery naturally converge. Fritsch’s prose is plainspoken and precise. Clarity, rather than flourish, defines the prose. Ruth stands as a quietly powerful presence, her courage revealing both the damage of submission and the possibility of moral clarity without religious absolutism. By resisting tragic framing, the story allows its protagonists both agency and joy. A quietly resolute affirmation of endurance, intimacy, and chosen family.
Pub date November 9, 2025
Asymmetric Words
ISBN 979-8985072679
Price $9.99 (USD) Paperback, $2.99 Kindle edition
