

And she doesn’t remember ever meeting Nora. When she wakes up, she’s forgotten the last two years. During a date in the woods, Stevie falls. They’ve been saving up for an apartment by saving their paychecks, plus Stevie’s job at a coffee shop two towns away is the perfect cover for the time she spends with Nora.Īfter all that meticulous planning, though, one moment erases everything they’ve worked for. They just need to get through the summer before they’re both off to California–Stevie secretly applied to UCLA and got in-and then they can start their life together. It’s been difficult keeping this private, including having to fake a better relationship with her parents than she believes and even maintaining friendships with people she no longer gets along with, but it will be worth it. When Stevie can’t sleep, she silently calls Nora and just listens to her voice, not wanting to wake up her parents in the next room by speaking herself.

So Nora and Stevie see each other in private, with dates in the woods. Stevie’s mother is deeply involved in the Catholic church, and her father watches Fox News almost every waking hour.

She has secretly been dating Nora for years, but in their small conservative town, being out isn’t an option. She just graduated high school and has big plans for what comes next… but almost no one in her life knows about them. This is an amnesia romance, but while that can sound like a soap opera premise-girl meets girl, girls fall in love, girl gets amnesia and forgets girl, girl tries to win her back-there’s an undercurrent of sadness here that keeps it feeling more grounded than that suggests. So when I saw that Derrick had a new sapphic YA book coming out just in time for the April 4th episode of All the Books, I had to read it. Last year, I reviewed She Gets the Girl written by Alyson Derrick and her wife, Rachael Lippincott, and really enjoyed it.
