Get Curious Is Launching, And I Need Your Help

My new novel, Get Curious, comes out in a few days (May 19th). I’ve been working on it for about three years because it turned out to be a challenging book to write with two plotlines and a host of details. Plus I’ve had a lot of life happening in parallel with my drafting. (More about that below.)

This book launch isn’t looking like any of my past launches, and I’m asking for your help.

It’s been a heck of a semester

Spring semester 2026 has been one of the hardest in recent memory and I’m including spring 2020. In December, ICE invaded Minnesota, which is not something I thought would happen in my lifetime (or ever in this country). I hoped to get through my entire life without thanking my Jewish Sunday School for teaching 12-year-old me what to do if your federal government turns against your community. At least I had a framework for that when most of the people around me didn’t, but having a framework doesn’t make it not horrible.

We’re still dealing with the aftermath, the damage to our community, the ongoing presence of ICE. At Macalester, where I teach, we have a lot of international students, and my classes tend to have a lot of queer and trans students. Starting into readings about difficult periods in queer history, from the context of living through a difficult period in history, was rough.

This has also been a semester where the overall health of my students, physical and mental, has been at a very challenging level. I usually have a few students dealing with health issues. This class, it’s almost half — mainly from the intense levels of stress. We started the semester with our state being invaded, and we ended it in a war. That’s an extraordinary amount of stress for people to carry, and stress has health consequences. So I’ve been paying close attention, intervening where I can, connecting students with disability services and other resources. It’s meaningful work, but it’s also a significant draw on time and attention.

I want to give myself the kind of space that I give my students, where it’s okay to be tired and sad. These are spaces we go through as humans (at least when we’re not driving ourselves like machines).

Also there’s family news

If you’ve been reading this blog/newsletter, you probably know my beloved fourteen-year-old dog Sabel was diagnosed with IVDD about a year and a half ago and has slowly been losing her ability to walk. By January I had a wagon and honestly, we love the wagon. We still have a great time together. She walks about half a block, gets in, rests as I pull her for a few blocks, then walks a little more. Her job as a dog has always been to make sure I stay in shape, and I’m pretty sure she knows it, so bringing in the wagon lets her keep doing this important job.

As spring has gone on, she keeps losing capacity. Last winter she’d walk three to five blocks total. Now we’re down to about two blocks (in three bursts of walking). She’s not in pain — I check with the vet every few months specifically for that — and she’s eating well and still playful. But it’s hard to watch her go from a dog who could run for miles, to a dog who could walk a few blocks, to a dog who can barely walk a block. 

It’s also been physically demanding in a way I didn’t anticipate. I carry her up and down the steps multiple times a day using an ergonomic harness that’s safe for both of us. I’m told my shoulders are noticeably broader than they used to be. However, my finger joints are suffering from repeatedly carrying 45 lbs up and down steps.

And then in early-to-mid April, my twenty-year-old cat Bears passed away. He’d had kidney disease for about four years, but it was really well managed. I’d started to wonder if he’d make it to twenty-two, because whenever he’d have a dip, he’d bounce back. A few weeks ago, he took a turn for the worse and did not bounce back. He declined very quickly over two days and the vet confirmed there was no way to help him recover. We helped him with the transition to what’s next. There was a lot of magic around it and also grief and missing the soft, little guy.

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Knowing this grief was coming — for Bears, and eventually for Sabel — I’ve been reading about it for months. If you’re navigating grief or anticipatory grief, I’d recommend The Grieving Brain, and for the more metaphysically inclined, Love and the Afterlife.

I’m dealing with Bears’ death as well as I can, but there’s still grief, and there’s still exhaustion, including the particular exhaustion that comes from knowing Sabel probably only has weeks or months left.

In the midst of all that, I’m also on a team of people helping transfer Rachel Pollack’s estate to the Harvard archive. I love this project and the team. You’ll be hearing more about this in future months. And also this work carries grief because I miss Rachel, and I feel cheated out of the last few years of getting to spend time with her because of the pandemic.

From the end of March to now, I have been living in what I can only call Grief Town. And Grief Town is not an ideal launching pad for a book.

So I’m asking for your help.

I don’t have a big launch planned. No video, no campaign. Just me, being honest with you, and saying: please help me, because I’m tired, and there is a lot to love about this book.

What’s in Get Curious?

The book is timely but also funny. Rev, the protagonist, is up against a right-wing politician and a whole lot of systemic bias. She’s also managing a health condition made worse by stress. Rev is rebellious and sweet: she wants to get into places, find what’s been hidden, uncover secrets. I admit this is an aspect of my own personality I really enjoyed putting on the page.

If you read Curious Minds, you might remember Char as a side character who didn’t get nearly enough page time. In Get Curious, she does. Rev is starting college; Char is a sophomore. They become close quickly and their dynamic is one of my favorite things in the book. Char is a people-pleaser who’s realizing she needs to stop being one. She’s drawn to Rev’s particular brand of rebellion — the kind that doesn’t hurt anyone — because she wants to learn how to do it herself. They each see early on that they can learn from the other, and they really enjoy each other.

I love that this book has friendship at its center. I write a lot of romances into my plots, sometimes at the center and other times as a side plot. Romance is wonderful, but I’m also someone with friendships that have lasted for decades, and I wanted to honor that.

There’s a mystery thread running back to around 1990 that I had a real good time with. I went into the last round of edits with a lot of excitement. I got to work with wonderful editors and I love where this book landed.

How can you help?

Please buy Get Curious if you can, whether you’ll read it yourself, regift it, or donate it to a queer community center or library. You can also call you local library to request a copy. The link at the top of this page shows many options for where to purchase the book.

If you have the time and energy to read and review it, that would be amazing. You can leave a review where you buy the book, on the Bella Books site, or on Goodreads. And, as much as I’ve been trying to avoid and absolutely do not support Amazon, reviews on that platform can make a big difference for authors like me. So if you’re comfortable buying and reviewing on Amazon, that would be a big boon.

If you want to tell someone about it, now is the time. If you want to post about it somewhere, I would be so grateful.

And since I’ve been meaning to donate more money to Minnesota causes, let’s use the hashtag #GetCuriousBook. Post on Instagram, Facebook, wherever you live online. I’ll count up the posts by the end of May, and I’ll donate $1 per post to one of the Minnesota charities supporting our immigrant community — because there is still a lot of work to be done here.

What are you doing in anticipation of Get Curious? I’d love to hear from you! Let me know in the comments on this post if you’re so inclined.

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