Little Fish

Casey Plett roared onto the LGBTQ literary scene in 2015 when her debut story collection A Safe Girl to Love (Topside Press) won the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction. In her second work of fiction and first novel, Casey explores issues of family and identity, in which the narrator Wendy, a thirty-year-old trans woman, comes across evidence that her late, devout Mennonite grandfather may have been trans himself. She is disinclined to believe it at first, but as her life becomes increasingly volatile, she becomes determined to find out the truth of her grandfather‘s story. Casey has an extraordinary ability to create moving and believable characters, which are at the heart of her novel. She is also a versatile writer; in addition to fiction, she is the co-editor of a non-fiction anthology on trans science fiction and fantasy (for Topside Books), and her non-fiction essays have been published widely. In Casey Plett‘s own words: "When I wrote A Safe Girl to Love, it was during a frenzied period of change for me, and the characters in the book were similarly changing, their lives uprooted in every way possible. They were young and moving and transitioning and crying and losing things and falling in love ... I starting writing Little Fish at a period when it seemed like my adult life wasn‘t going to be changing much, and in fact it looked a lot like it had when I was a kid: broke, in Manitoba, Canada. It felt right, in a lot of different ways, to write about a woman who was more or less in stasis, and whose prognosis for the future wasn‘t too different from her past, even as her life is burning down all around her." Advance blurb confirmed by Meredith Russo, the acclaimed trans author of the YA novel If I Was Your Girl (winner of a 2017 ALA Stonewall Book Award).