Caren Gussoff's Three Songs for Roxy

 
I'm pleased to announce the Publication of Three Songs for Roxy, a novella by Caren Gussoff, in both small trade paperback and e-book editions. Three Songs for Roxy tells three inter-related tales: of Kizzy, a foundling raised by a Romany Gypsy family in present-day Seattle, as she is about to be claimed by the aliens who left her to be raised as human; of Scott Lynn Miller, an unstable survivor of Katrina and security guard who is deeply affected by what he witnesses when the aliens contact Kizzy; and of "Natalie," an alien assigned to retrieve Kizzy, who is befriended by the current champion of the "Night of a Thousand Stevies" and falls in love with Kizzy's adopted sister Roxy. Three Songs for Roxy explores issues of identity, gender, sexuality, and what it means to be an outsider.

“Some stories aren’t meant to be told. The more they get told, the more they change from what they once were, worn down and smooth like pieces of sea glass too beautiful to have ever been broken bottles. In the telling, mundane stories become colorful, colorful becomes fantastic, fantastic becomes legend, and legend becomes myth. Some stories aren’t meant to be beautiful or mythic, they are meant to be true—chachi paramcha—and so those are better not told.”—from Three Songs for Roxy

Gussoff, nevertheless, tells some of those stories in all their mundane (and colorful) details. When does the mundane become fantastic? And when is the fantastic mistaken for the mundane? Gussoff’s is a world of permeable borders.

The book, which is the forty-second volume in the Conversation Pieces series, is available now in both print and e-book editions through Aqueduct's website and will soon be available elsewhere.