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.
What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? That’s the starting point for A Room Made of Leaves, a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.
Aaron lives with his single mother and his bookish older brother Connor in a small town with a ramshackle chook shed and an old bath full of rainfish in the backyard. Feeling left out as the younger brother, he commits a theft to impress an older rebellious kid. RAINFISH is a middle-grade novel that lets its readers explore how to cope with big feelings and emotions, with joy, happiness, regret and remorse. It subtly teaches about truth telling and the importance of knowing when to own up to things. The writing is sophisticated while remaining accessible.
Meg lives alone: a little place in the bush outside town. A perfect place to hide. That’s one of the reasons she offers to shelter Nerine, who’s escaping a violent ex. The other is that Meg knows what it’s like to live with an abusive partner. When Nerine arrives she’s jumpy and her two little girls are frightened. It tells Meg all she needs to know about where they’ve come from, so she’s not that surprised when Nerine asks her to get hold of a gun. But she knows it’s unnecessary. They’re safe now. Then she starts to wonder about some little things. A disturbed flyscreen. A tune playing on her windchimes. Has Nerine’s ex tracked them down? Has Meg’s husband turned up to torment her some more? By the time she finds out it’ll be too late to do anything but run for her life. SHELTER is for fans of Jane Harper, Dervla McTiernan and Garry Disher.