“By turns hysterical and poignant” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)
It’s 2005: Cell phones are dumb, dick pics are email attachments, and twenty-one-year-old Drew is aimlessly circling in a small Vermont town. Taking a job at a horse stable, Drew is drawn to her seemingly decent but heartbroken manager, Tristan, but finds herself even more entranced by his stories of Cleo, his older, elusive ex.
When Cleo reemerges to open a coffee shop, Drew bolts over to work there instead. Soon the women are an exhilarating conspiracy of two, serving and snarking on regular locals and tourists while drawing closer to each other. Then, in the wake of a personal tragedy, Cleo embarks on an affair with a newcomer. As their intimacy shifts and slips, Drew begins to lose herself—but how much of herself did she have in the first place?
Genevieve Plunkett’s latest is an offbeat ode to bisexual desire, identity, and how far a person will go to avoid feeling lonely.