Girls Girls Girls by Shoshana von Blanckensee

Description

Girls Girls Girls
by Shoshana von Blanckensee
Paperback | ISBN: 9798217181988

Tender, emotionally charged, and richly alive with queer longing and 1990s nostalgia, Girls Girls Girls is a striking debut novel about first love, reinvention, and the complicated search for home.

It is the summer of 1996 when Hannah and Sam leave Long Beach, New York behind and set out for San Francisco, chasing the promise of freedom, queer community, and a future where they can finally exist openly as a couple. Best friends to the outside world and secret girlfriends to each other, the two young women hope the West Coast will offer escape from judgment, repression, and the suffocating expectations of Hannah’s Orthodox Jewish upbringing.

For Hannah especially, leaving is both liberation and heartbreak. She longs for a life where she no longer has to hide herself, yet departure also means distancing herself from her beloved Bubbe and the only community she has ever known.

But San Francisco is not the uncomplicated paradise they imagined.

Struggling to survive financially, Hannah and Sam begin stripping at The Chez Paree, forcing Hannah to bury herself beneath yet another dangerous secret. While Sam embraces their new life and begins forming connections within the city’s queer scene, Hannah feels increasingly alienated from both her work and herself. Then she meets Chris, an older butch lesbian whose confidence and stability offer an intoxicating alternative to the uncertainty consuming her relationship with Sam.

As Hannah becomes entangled in Chris’s world, the fragile bond between the two young women begins to fracture. Without Sam defining so much of her identity, Hannah must confront difficult questions about love, independence, sexuality, faith, and the terrifying possibility of becoming someone entirely new.

Beautifully written and emotionally resonant, Girls Girls Girls explores queer identity, chosen family, survival, intimacy, and self-discovery with remarkable tenderness and honesty. Shoshana von Blanckensee captures the exhilaration and confusion of queer adulthood in the 1990s while honoring the messy, painful, and transformative process of building a life on your own terms.

Heartfelt, sensual, and deeply human, Girls Girls Girls is perfect for readers of literary queer fiction, lesbian coming-of-age stories, and emotionally rich novels about love, identity, and belonging.