A funny and heart-warming own-voices autistic story about deciphering the confusing signals of attraction and navigating a path to love.
SOCIAL QUEUE
by Kay Kerr
Text Publishing, Summer 2022
I thought I was nobody’s teen crush, but turns out I was just missing the signs. Zoe Kelly is starting a new phase of her life. High school was a mess of bullying and autistic masking that left her burnt out and shut down. Now, with an internship at an online media company—the first step on the road to her dream writing career—she is ready to reinvent herself. But she didn’t count on returning to her awkward and all-too-recent high-school experiences for her first writing assignment. When her piece, about her non-existent dating life, goes viral, eighteen-year-old Zoe is overwhelmed and more than a little surprised by the response. But, with a deadline and a list of romantic contenders from the past to reconnect with for her piece on dating, she is hoping one of her old sparks will turn into a new flame.
Kay Kerr is a former journalist and community newspaper editor from Brisbane, now living on the Sunshine Coast with her husband and daughter and working as a freelance writer. Kay was writing Please Don’t Hug Me, her debut novel, when she received her own autism-spectrum diagnosis.
For as long as sixteen-year-old Adele can remember the village of Oakvale has been surrounding by the dark woods—a forest filled with terrible monsters that light cannot penetrate. Like every person who grows up in Oakvale she has been told to steer clear of the woods unless absolutely necessary. But unlike her neighbors in Oakvale, Adele has a very good reason for going into the woods. Adele is one of a long line of guardians, women who are able to change into wolves and who are tasked with the job of protecting their village while never letting any of the villagers know of their existence. But when following her calling means abandoning the person she loves, the future she imagined for herself, and her values she must decide how far she is willing to go to keep her neighbors safe.
1860, Louisiana. After serving as mistress of Le Petit Cottage for more than six decades, Madame Sylvie Guilberthas decided, in spite of her family’s indifference, to sit for a portrait—a testament to all the hardships she has overcome, and the glory that her life ought to have had. But there are other important stories to be told on the Guilbert plantation. Like that of Thisbe, the young enslaved woman who must stand silent by her mistress, but who observes everything. Or Byron, the heir to the plantation, whose desires cannot possibly fit with his family duty. Stories that span generations, from the big house to out in the fields, of routine horrors, secrets buried as deep as the family fortune, and a tangled lineage of descendants and dependents who have never forgotten who they are.
When a plane commissioned by the CDC to transport a newly identifed virus to a testing facility for early vaccine development crashes in a lake community just outside Touristville, Florida, three teens—previously unknown to one another—accidentally ingest tainted water and are told they have 30–60 days to live. Albie is 16 years old and the glue for his crumbling family. Cameron has dreamed of getting out of Touristville, Florida for as long as her parents made her join a vaudeville act at the tender age of fve. But it’s Lacey—sweet, angelic, full–of–shit Lacey—who has the idea to start a support group. It’s also Lacey who fleeces Albie and Cameron out of fifteen bucks per session. So when Cameron and Albie catch Lacey conning a tourist into letting her “borrow” a yacht, they know she has no intention of returning it. And they have every intention of joining her. When three teens on the brink of death form an unlikely alliance, how do they react? For starters, they steal a yacht. And then they have one of the best adventures of their lives: an adventure that results in a true reckoning with who they really are. Will Albie learn to come out of his shell and truly experience life for the first time? Will running away force Cameron to grapple with a repressed secret that’s made her restless for years? And when—in the end— they discover their lives are not over, how will Lacey reckon with the fallout of her lies? This coming–of–age–tale set on a yacht examines the ways three very different teens grapple with the threat of imminent death, and how each emerges with very different ideas of what life ought to be.
Instagram-famous triplets Cecily, Amber, and Rudy—the children of home renovation superstars—are ready for a perfect summer. They’ve just moved into the site of their parents’ latest renovation project when they begin to receive chilling messages from someone called The Follower. It soon becomes clear that this anonymous threat is more than a simple Internet troll, and he can’t wait to shatter the Cole family’s perfect veneer and take back what’s his. THE FOLLOWER examines the implications of what it is to be watched in the era of social media fame—as well as the lies we tell and the lengths we’ll go to uphold a perfect image, when our lives depend on it.