Margins
Tell the Rest book cover
Tell the Rest
2023
First Published
3.82
Average Rating
332
Number of Pages

Two estranged childhood friends find themselves on parallel paths to return to the site of the conversion therapy camp that tore them apart. Delia Barnes and Ernest Wrangham met as teens at Celebration Camp, a church-supported conversion therapy program—a dubious, unscientific Christian practice meant to “change” a person’s sexuality. After witnessing a close friend suffer a devastating tragedy in the hands of the camp “counselors,” they escaped in the night, only to take separate roads to their distant homes. They have no idea how each have faired 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 university and loses her wife to another woman in rapid succession, she returns to her hometown of Rockside, Oregon to coach the girls’ basketball team at her high school alma mater. Ernest, meanwhile, is a renowned poet in New York City who’s left behind his loving husband for 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 remain on a 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.

Avg Rating
3.82
Number of Ratings
234
5 STARS
22%
4 STARS
43%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads

Author

Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Author · 17 books
Preorder Lucy's new novel, TELL THE REST, about love, rage, and redemption, at https://amzn.to/3QRyHXD. The New York Times says Lucy Jane Bledsoe's novel, A THIN BRIGHT LINE, "triumphs." Ms. Magazine calls her novel, THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE, "fabulous feminist fiction." Her 2018 collection of stories, LAVA FALLS, won the Devil's Kitchen Fiction Award. Bledsoe played basketball in both high school and college. As a social justice activist, she's passionate about working for voting rights.
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