LoveReading Says
You know when sometimes a book feels like it was written specifically for you? This is one of those for me.
I sometimes felt like the authors must have installed a Family Friend in my house from how specifically it skewered what me and my friends have been talking about recently.
Blackett and Gleichman are experts of irony, and poking at hypocrisy, making their reader feel both smug and called out. Sharp as an artisanal vegetable peeler, outrageously horny and thrillingly ominous, Trust & Safety is the morality tale the queers need right now. It straddles wish-fulfilment and dystopia, cottagecore escapism and Black Mirror-esque warning. Reading it will also unlock your lumberjack kink.
I found it so engrossing that I was always excited to continue reading it, but also incredibly stressed while I was. I chuckled and cringed along, part wishing I was on the queer commune with the traumatically hot Dylan, yet also impossibly glad that I wasn’t actually there, so that I wouldn’t inevitably fail to impress.
Urgh, I loved it so much. Am going to recommend it to all my friends and their polycules.
Lily Lindon
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Trust and Safety Synopsis
A wry yet tenderhearted novel about a couple who attempt to buy their way into a 'wild and precious' existence in the Hudson Valley, where they become entangled with a queer couple living the dream analog life.
Newlywed Rosie has grown disenchanted with NYC. Inspired by Instagram ads, she starts thirsting for a rural life upstate – one full of beauty and simplicity. Willing to do anything for Rosie's happiness, her tech-bro husband, Jordan, acquiesces to her vision for the future, and they offer – well above asking price – on a beautiful, historic fixer-upper in the Hudson Valley. But when Jordan suddenly loses his job on the day they close the deal, the couple is forced to rent out the property's dilapidated outbuilding.
Enter Dylan and Lark: an incredibly attractive and handy queer couple who offer to rent the outbuilding and help Rosie and Jordan with repairs. They're living the life Rosie had envisioned for herself: hand-built furniture, herbal tinctures, guinea hens, and hand-dyed linens. Rosie grows increasingly infatuated with their new tenants, especially with model-esque and charismatic Dylan – to Jordan's increasing distress.
Whip-smart and searingly funny, Trust and Safety examines questions of authenticity, betrayal, belonging and entitlement, while poking fun at contemporary fear of the ‘gay agenda’. It’s a satirical anti-romcom, perfect for fans of Naoise Dolan, Kristen Arnett and Torrey Peters.
About This Edition
Laura Blackett, Eve Gleichman Press Reviews
Blackett and Gleichman have an extraordinary talent for getting to the heart of what makes a character so horribly human, our hypocrisies and basest desires. Trust and Safety is wickedly funny, astute and brilliantly, terribly relatable... I could not put it down -- Laura Kay, author of Wild Things and Making It
Sexy, surprising, witty and beautifully written-Trust and Safety is a complete delight from start to finish -- Andrea Bartz, New York Times bestselling author of The Spare Room and We Were Never Here
Trust and Safety is distressingly smart, wickedly sly, and side-clutchingly hilarious - I was howling! I simply could not turn away. Blackett and Gleichman achieve the best kind of storytelling: the type that forces you to contend with their characters' choices, then holds up a mirror so you're implicated in their foibles and bad decision-making - all while demanding that you turn the page because you simply must know how it ends. What a brilliantly observed and witty take on the sometimes absurd ways we choose to live. And how blessedly and wonderfully gay -- Vanessa Chan, author of The Storm We Made
Smart, playful and perfectly surprising, Trust and Safety is a matryoshka of tart observations that illuminate the strange and many contradictions of contemporary life -- Cecilia Rabess, author of Everything's Fine
What happens when we try to live the life that Instagram is selling us? This is the question that Trust and Safety hilariously-and poignantly-asks. In answering it, Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman spare no one, taking aim at everyone from tech bros to overbearing mothers. It's a smart, funny, and timely exploration of what happens when our obsessions get the better of us, and when we discover that authenticity is not as authentic as it seems -- Grant Ginder, author of The People We Hate at the Wedding
