Tell the Rest

DELIA BARNES AND ERNEST WRANGHAM met as teens at Celebration Camp, a church-supported conversion therapy program--the dubious, unscientific, Christian practice meant to change a person's sexuality. After witnessing a devastating tragedy, they escaped in the night, only to take separate roads to their distant homes.

They have no idea how each has fared through the years. Delia is a college basketball coach who prides herself on being an empowering and self-possessed role model for her players. But when she gets fired from her elite East Coast college, she's forced to return to her hometown of Rockside, Oregon, to coach at her high school alma mater.

Ernest, meanwhile, is a renowned poet with a temporary teaching job in Portland, Oregon. His work has always been boundary-pushing, fearless. But the poem he's most wanted to write--about his dangerous escape from Celebration Camp--remains stubbornly out of reach.

Both persist in the mission to overcome the consequences and inhumane costs of conversion therapy. As events find them hurtling toward each other once again, they both grapple with the necessity of remaining steadfast in one's truth, no matter how slippery that can be. Tell the Rest is a powerful novel about coming to terms, with family, history, violence, loss, sexuality, and ultimately, with love.

Author: Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 03/07/2023
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.30w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9781636140797


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2023
Publishers Weekly 01/02/2023
Booklist 02/15/2023 pg. 22
Library Journal 03/31/2023 pg. 1

About the Author
Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of several works of fiction, including A Thin Bright Line, which was a Lambda Literary Award and Ferro-Grumley Award finalist. She is the winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Award, a Yaddo Fellowship, a California Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships, and a finalist for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Award. A native of Portland, Oregon, she now lives in Berkeley, California.