Green Glass Ghosts Book

RELEASE DATE - 17 FEBRUARY 2022

Reading age - 14 to 17 years.

At age nineteen, the queer narrator of Green Glass Ghosts steps off a bus on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver, a city where the faceless condo towers of the wealthy loom over the streets to of the east side where folks are just trying to get by, against the deceptively beautiful backdrop of snow-capped mountains and sparkling ocean.

Rae Spoon's third book and first novel, Green Glass Ghosts takes place in the year 2000, when the world is still mostly analogue - pagers are the best way to get hold of someone and resumes are printed out on paper and dropped off in person, but what's this new fad called webmail?

Armed with only their guitar and their voice, our hopeful hero arrives on the West Coast at the beginning of the new millennium and on the cusp of adulthood, fleeing a traumatic childhood in an unsafe family plagued by religious extremism, mental health crises, and abuse in a conservative city not known for accepting difference.

They're eager to build a better life among like-minded folks, and before they know it, they've got a job, an apartment, openly non-binary friends, and a new queer love, dancing, busking, and making out in bars, parks, art spaces, and apartments from Commercial Drive to Wreck Beach. But their search for belonging and stability is disrupted by excessive drinking, jealousy, and painful memories of the past, distracting the protagonist from their ultimate goal of playing live music and spurring them to an emotional crisis

If they can't learn to care for themselves, how will they ever find true connection and community?

The haunting black-and-white illustrations by Gem Hall conjure the moody, misty urban landscape and represent a deep collaboration with the author based on their shared experience of seeking safety, authenticity, and acceptance on the West Coast. Green Glass Ghosts is an evocation of that delicate, aching moment between youth and adulthood when we are trying, and often failing, to become the person we dream ourselves to be.

"Green Glass Ghosts is a compelling coming-of-age story that is so specific and yet so universal. Every queer and trans person will recognise themselves, their friends, someone they've known, loved, and lost in this novel. The collaboration between Gem Hall and Rae Spoon is tender, haunting, raw, honest, asking of us to not only look back at our past selves but also dream up different possibilities for our future. This is a book to hold in our hearts."
Kama La Mackerel, author of ZOM-FAM

"Rae Spoon and Gem Hall's Green Glass Ghosts documents a time that hasn't been written much about, and needs to be - a particular kind of working-class, queer/trans kid life in early 2000s Vancouver. Spoon and Hall craft a portrait of the many kinds of ghosts - of trauma, colonisation, and displacement - in that place and time, and the messy, persisting dollar pizza-eating queer and trans kids trying to get by and make something different, even if we don't know how. Hall's artwork does a beautiful job of capturing this place and all the beings on both sides of the veil who inhabit this queer space of becoming."
Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work and Dirty River

"Glass Ghosts is hopeful and raw in its honest depiction of how survivors experience and interface through their filters, the cautionary tale of 'medicine' becoming poison, how we sometimes need to be taught self-care, patiently by loving Others, those surrogate strangers, gently moving us toward trust, as we imperfectly seek stability on an ever-shifting coastline."
Imogen Di Sapia, associate member, European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC); writer/textile artist (The Selkie: Weaving and the Wild Feminine)

"This book is wild and familiar, not unlike young queer lust, love, or existence. It perfectly encapsulates the balances between being wide-eyed and resourceful, running away and running to. Spoon and Hall clearly know that survival is a messy landscape, with as many hands pulling you down as there are lifting you up. Reading this book is being lifted up, a firm reminder of still being here."
Tara-Michelle Ziniuk, editor (THIS Magazine), writer (Whatever, Iceberg, Somewhere to Run From, Emergency Contact)

"Lonely and spectral and hopeful. A book about being young and queer. About trying to find community, create a home, and stay in the world despite old trauma and new harms in the places you seek safety. A tether for when you feel yourself floating away."
Jaime Burnet, musician (Sockfoot), writer (Crocuses Hatch from Snow)