Girls Girls Girls
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2026 LAMBDA Literary Award
Finalist for the 2026 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize
Finalist for the 2025 CALIBA Golden Poppy Award
Longlisted for the 2026 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
"Jam-packed with queer angst and queer joy . . . and a truly incredible amount of heart. I devoured this novel." —Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One
"A teary-eyed love letter to the San Francisco that remains and to its establishments that are long-gone. But above all [Girls Girls Girls] tenderly tells the story of a vulnerable young queer person in an unfamiliar place, just trying to create a new version of home." —San Francisco Chronicle
It’s the summer of ’96 and secret girlfriends Hannah and Sam are driving across the country from Long Beach, New York, to the fabled queer paradise of San Francisco, finally free from the stifling demands of Hannah’s devout Orthodox Jewish mother. In San Francisco, they can be a real couple, out in the open, around other queer people.
But when the financial strains of West Coast living push the girls to start stripping at the Chez Paree, Hannah feels trapped. Until she meets Chris, an older butch lesbian, who is immediately taken with her. Desperate to stay in San Francisco and away from the leering men at the club, Hannah proposes an escort arrangement.
As Hannah falls deeper into Chris’s world, and Sam starts to meet new queer friends, a rift forms between them. Without Sam, who is Hannah? And what does San Francisco mean to Hannah alone? An achingly tender and resonant story of survival, first love, and growing up queer in the '90s, Girls Girls Girls is a piercing exploration of the choices we make in the thrilling and often confounding search for ourselves and home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Von Blanckensee's propulsive debut, a gay teen comes of age in oppressive 1990s Long Beach, N.Y., before heading west in search of freedom. At 18, Hannah and her girlfriend, Sam, hatch plans to leave Long Beach and drive across the country to San Francisco, where they can live openly as a couple. In Reno, they meet another lesbian pair, each of whom earns a living by stripping. After Hannah and Sam arrive in San Francisco with little money, they rent a small room and desperately try to find jobs. Inspired by the couple they met in Reno, Sam pressures Hannah into auditioning with her for a strip club whose manager is open to hiring girls without experience. While Sam takes to dancing and soon meets new friends, Hannah doesn't like it and instead finds work as an escort, which strains their relationship. When Hannah finds out her grandmother is terminally ill, she returns to Long Beach, where she reconnects with another close friend and attempts to chart a path forward. Von Blanckensee pulls the reader in with this voice-driven and heartfelt narrative, and adds texture with gritty details of 1990s San Francisco. This delivers the goods.
