In this queer, modern reimagining of Thelma & Louise, two best friends go on the run after stabbing a would-be rapist in a journey that grows darker and deadlier with each new disastrous decision they make.
TROUBLE GIRLS
by Julia Lynn Rubin
Wednesday Books/St. Martin’s Press, June 2021 (voir catalogue)
When Trixie picks up her best friend, Lux, for their first solo weekend getaway, she’s just looking to escape for a little while, to forget the despair of being trapped in her dead-end rustbelt town and the daunting responsibility of caring for her ailing mother. But a single moment of violence will forever change the course of the girls’ lives as they become wanted fugitives. Trying to stay ahead of the cops and a hellscape of media attention, the girls encounter an unforgiving landscape, rapidly diminishing supplies, and bad choices at every turn. As they are transformed by the media into the face of a #metoo movement they didn’t ask to lead and the road before them runs out, Trixie and Lux realize that they can only rely on each other and that the love they find together is the one thing that truly makes them free.
Julia Lynn Rubin earned her MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from The New School in 2017. For three years she served as a writing mentor for Girls Write Now, New York City’s premiere writing program for high school girls. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as the North American Review, The Lascaux Review and RipRap Literary Journal, among others. She is also the author of the young adult novel Burro Hills (Diversion Books, 2018), a queer contemporary with shades of The Outsiders, which was listed as one of the 2018 Best LGBT YA titles by B&N’s Teen Blog and was featured along with Mark Oshiro in the 2018 Brooklyn Book Festival. Julia currently lives in Brooklyn where she is working on her next writing projects.
Skye Starling is overjoyed when her boyfriend, Burke Michaels, proposes after a whirlwind courtship. Though Skye seems to have the world at her fingertips—she’s smart, beautiful, and from a well-off family—she has also battled crippling OCD since her mother’s death when she was eleven, and her romantic relationships have suffered as a result. But now Burke—handsome, older, and more emotionally mature than any other man she’s met before—says he wants to take care of her. Forever. Except, Burke isn’t who he says he is. And interspersed letters to his therapist reveal that he is happily married and using Skye for his own, deceptive ends. In a third perspective, set thirty years earlier, a scrappy seventeen-year-old named Heather is determined to end things with Burke, a local bad boy. But can her adolescent love stay firmly in her past—or will he find his way into her future? On a collision course she doesn’t see coming, Skye throws herself into wedding planning, as Burke’s scheme grows ever more twisted. Meanwhile, three decades in the past, Heather’s longed-for transformation finally seems within reach…yet even the best laid plans can go astray. And just when you think you know where this story is going, you’ll discover that there’s more than one way to spin the truth.
After the first season of her true crime podcast became an overnight sensation and set an innocent man free, Rachel Krall is now a household name—and the last hope for thousands of people seeking justice. But she’s used to being recognized for her voice, not her face. Which makes it all the more unsettling when she finds a note on her car windshield, addressed to her, begging for help. The small seaside town of Neapolis is being torn apart by a devastating rape trial. The town’s golden boy, a swimmer destined for Olympic greatness, has been accused of raping a high school student, the beloved granddaughter of the town’s legendary police chief. Under huge pressure to make Season Three of her podcast a success, Rachel throws herself into covering the rape trial —but the mysterious letters keep showing up in unexpected places. Someone is following her, and she won’t stop until Rachel finds out what happened to her sister twenty-five years ago. Officially, Jenny Stills tragically drowned while swimming at night at a local beach, but the writer insists her sister was murdered—and when Rachel starts asking questions, nobody seems to want to answer. The past and present start to collide as Rachel uncovers startling connections between the two cases, connections that will change the course of the trial and the lives of everyone involved. Electrifying and propulsive, THE NIGHT SWIM asks: Can a small town ever right the wrongs of its past? And what really happened to Jenny Stills?