A hauntingly tender debut about love, loss, and becoming yourself.
In her emotionally incisive and deeply atmospheric debut, Sorley traces the long aftershock of first love across the American West, following one girl’s painful evolution from dutiful daughter to reluctant architect of her own life. In the summer of 1990, sheltered teenager Janie Harris takes a job at a lakeside diner hoping for freedom from her devout family. Instead, she meets Lydia, a girl whose quiet confidence reshapes Janie’s understanding of love, faith, and herself. When their relationship is discovered, Janie is forced to choose between the safety of the life she’s always known and an uncertain future beyond the limits of her small California town.
Janie is not a natural rebel, but a deeply dutiful girl shaped by the rigid comforts of church, family, and small-town life. Sorley tenderly captures Janie’s struggle as Lydia awakens desires, fears, and possibilities she has spent her life trying not to imagine. The book excels at rendering the intimate texture of adolescence: the charged silence between conversations, the significance of borrowed mixtapes and shared comics, the dizzying terror of wanting something you cannot safely name aloud. The romance unfolds with remarkable patience and authenticity. Equally compelling is the novel’s refusal to sentimentalize consequence. As the narrative stretches beyond that formative summer and into adulthood, Janie’s choices reverberate through years marked by longing, reinvention, guilt, and the persistent ache of unfinished emotional business.
Rich in sensory detail and sharply attuned to the contradictions of faith, family, and queer identity, this is a tender, unflinching portrait of self-discovery and the difficult grace of letting go. A stunner.
***
Pub date February 17, 2026
Nimble Scribbler Press
ISBN 979-8998739019
Price $29.99 (USD) Hardcover, $18.99 Paperback, $9.99 Kindle edition
