Why read It's Not Like I Knew Her?

Book cover of It's Not Like I Knew Her

Book description

Jodie Taylor's childhood is filled with loss, abuse, chronic disappointment, and an instinctive awareness that her desire for women will forever make her an outcast. At 18, she flees her home town in rural north Florida and arrives in racially charged Selma, Alabama in 1956 as a penniless fugitive.She finds…

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The South

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Why read it?

1 author picked It's Not Like I Knew Her as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

S.W. Leicher

Author

Spears’ compelling tale of Jodie Taylor—a lesbian coming of age in the American South of the 1950s and 1960s—smoothly draws readers into that overall time and place through details of setting (a “Pepto-Bismol pink trailer raised on cinder blocks”), behavior (a girl gleefully pouring salted peanuts into an RC Cola) and history (the Birmingham Church bombing) before plunging us into the far-less-familiar inner world of mid-century Southern lesbians. We gain privileged entrée into wildly rollicking bars and snugly welcoming kitchens; witness acts of treachery and acts of fierce loyalty; come to know women of tough skins and tender hearts. “It…

From S.W.'s list on shattering the image of the word lesbian.