Happy Saturday! Last night was my kids’ party. Their birthdays are only 5 days apart, so they often share. We took them and six friends to do an escape room. They didn’t quite make it out, but it was pretty close. Everyone had a blast.
Last week, I shared from my recent release, “Year of the Guilty Soul,” a novella-length YA story that’s included in the Seasons of Love anthology from Beaten Track. All the stories are great, so be sure to check them out. You can find all of them separately as well as in the anthology as a whole.
Here’s the blurb from mine:
The year is 1991, and Antonia “Toni” Moskowitz is caught in the middle, always having to pick a side. Whether it’s between her family’s two religions or in her relationships, she has choices to make. Does her heart belong to the outgoing boy with the lime-green nails or the girl in the black velvet skirt? Where does she fit in when both gender and gender roles feel confining?
But learning who she is and who she wants to be with has a price. Every decision has consequences, especially when some kinds of love and expression are still taboo. Sometimes it’s hard to choose between being good and being right. Four seasons. Four kisses. One year to figure out what her heart wants.
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And here is this week’s snippet:
Levi is Dom’s boyfriend, but no one says so. It’s one of those things everyone avoids talking about, like how Dad doesn’t tell his parents I’m going to church with my other grandparents or how no one says anything when Matteo wears Sofia’s outgrown dress-up clothes and gets into Mom’s Avon drawer and pinches her tiny sample lipstick tubes. Gran and Gramps call Dom and Levi “roommates.” I don’t think my parents are against Dom being gay, but it’s not open for discussion. I wonder sometimes if it’s because they worry about him, not because they agree with my church or with Gran and Gramps.
Rainbow Snippets is a safe and welcoming space for LGBTQIA+ authors, readers, and bloggers to share 6 sentences each week from a work of fiction—published or in-progress—or a book recommendation. Feel free to join in!
Silence can be so stifling and lonely…I feel for the narrator.
I second that comment from K.S. ~nods~ Thank you for sharing. Happy Writing!
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Good snip, so hard to understand the silences in families about relationships.
I love the way she tries to work it all out in her head.
Sounds like the world I grew up in. Anyone LGBT was called “them” in hushed tones so I couldn’t possibly want to be one of “them.” Such things are very confusing when you’re young and really one of “them” inside after all.
The dynamics and silences in a family can be so difficult to figure out, even for someone in the middle of it. Great snippet.
It’s often the things we’re afraid to talk about that becomes trouble