BELLA BOOKS PRESENTS
“As always, Rachel Gold does cutting edge fiction like no one else.”
– Ellen Hart, author of In a Midnight Wood and Mystery Writers of America Grand Master
CURIOUS MINDS
BY RACHEL GOLD
A TREASURE HUNT THROUGH LESBIAN, BI, QUEER AND SAPPHIC FICTION!
A group of LGBTQ+ college students find themselves, and a whole lot of trouble, as they search for a retired professor’s hidden, immensely valuable coin collection. Clues come from decoding classic lesbian and sapphic books—but in six years no one has found the treasure.
Second-generation lesbian Maze Lister planned to skip the treasure hunt. She’s read all the books—they’re in her moms’ library—and doesn’t need the money. But a late night spent with charismatic athlete Lys Neil changes her mind. The two of them bond over their neurodivergent minds, even though they handle their ADHD in sharply different ways.
Maze and Lys decide to compete in the treasure hunt together, but chance puts them on competing teams within a group of students just as determined as they are—and willing to bend the rules. Secret teams form, accusations fly, and everyone starts to learn much more about themselves than they bargained for. Can they decode the stories and find the prize before a malevolent classmate turns them against each other and takes the treasure for herself?
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR, RACHEL GOLD
It’s been a long time since I posted because I’ve been learning to teach college during a pandemic. Some backstory: I graduated from Macalester College in the 90s and then in 2019 was offered the opportunity to teach there, starting in January 2020. (Cue the dramatic and foreshadowing music!)
My first class there was LGBTQ2S+ Literature, which is so popular that I’ve now taught it six times in three years. I’ve taught in a variety of settings, but hadn’t taught literature to college students—and as I was learning how to do that well, a whole-ass pandemic hit and I caught Covid in spring 2020.
I thought the pandemic would be over in 18 months, so I started a novel set during lockdown, only to find in the winter of 2021 that I could not keep writing it. Trying to work on it while still in the midst of everything this pandemic has brought and brought up for people was much too heavy. Plus I had long Covid symptoms for about 18 months after the initial virus. The secret for me turned out to be way more sleep than I thought I needed and learning other ways to rest, which seems like it’s going to be a good investment for the rest of my life.
I switched my novel writing to another idea: a literary treasure hunt loosely based on my experiences teaching LGBTQ2S+ Lit. I wanted to give readers, teens and older, the feelings I’ve experienced while being a travel guide for smart, curious students going through hundreds of years of literary history. They have such a sense of wonder about earlier queer and trans generations!
In the novel, Maze’s parents are lesbian to give readers both a sense of history and the way that history is fragmented—because Maze’s parents don’t have any queer elders to teach them. The characters read through some of the books I teach in my class and a few new ones. I haven’t mentioned all the classics of lesbian, queer and bi women’s literature—for one thing, I stuck to American Lit—but I hope readers will be delighted with the journey.