Summer of the Cicadas by Chelsea Catherine

Her crush object for half her life is Natasha, whose best-frienddom with Jess's dead sister keeps the two orbiting each other. It wouldn't ever take much to slide into 'oh FFS get ***OVER*** yourself' territory in a story about a woman coming to terms with the boundaries and limitations and unhappinesses of an isolated rural lesbian life. Author Catherine, for the most part, stays on the correct side of the line, but it's always an uncomfortable slip away from unpleasantness. There's a real risk to making your PoV character a smartass in a first-person present-tense novel. 'But no handcuffs this time.' She's speaking to the sheriff, her ex-boss, and referring to the time he had to arrest her at a local strip club and then, because she was coked to the tits and causing a disturbance, fire her. It does go a long way, this 'tude: 'Fine,' I say to Mason. The habit was established early, despite her close and accepting family.she relives a moment where her country-farmer father has The Talk with her, emphasizing that he loves his daughter and supports her exactly how she is (!!–this is how we know it's fiction).but living among people who smell, sense in some way anyway, your Otherness and make your life a living hell can undo even the best parenting. Jessica, whose first-person close PoV we're in for the entire book, is a past mistress of negative self-talk. Coming home makes her fall into old, rejected-by-all patterns of thought. After many years' effort to Fit In (as she sees it), a personal tragedy derails her attempts to build an authentic life in Washington, DC. THANK YOU.Ī book of eerie, unnatural-nature events pushing one lone and lonely lesbian, returned to small-town West Virginia from a law-enforcement career, to deal with Life. I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM RED HEN PRESS VIA EDELWEISS+.

Summer of the Cicadas by Chelsea Catherine