Description

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A story about how music and film connects us to who we’ve loved, who we’ve been, and who we are becoming — and that lying beneath the façade of teenage cynicism is the profound desire to be understood and loved.

Reeling from the death of her parents in a car crash, teenage Billie travels over the rainbow and under tangled concrete overpasses, from her native Austin, Texas to the improbably named Liberal, Kansas. Her plan is to live with her godfather, Adam, “a lonely, gay, film geek stuck inside a jock’s body – a jock’s world.” His partner Steven run the Starlite, a movie theater and safe haven for their eccentricities and artistic yearnings. Together, they face new challenges as they help a grieving teen find the path to her true self, while the couple themselves live with the compromises they’ve made for the sake of comfort.

Liberal, the adopted home of Oz’s Dorothy, is also home to small-town intolerance, immature adults with unsettled scores, and their children, some who resist and others who succumb to their parents’ prejudices. Along the way Billie meets Clara — a goth, lesbian Dorothy impersonator who’s used to being an outsider — and Dylan — who finds himself caught between his old allegiance to rigid cliques and his magnetic attraction to this new girl who rocks Frida Kahlo tees and cowboy boots.

About the Author

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Robert Mailer Anderson is a San Francisco-based writer, producer, and activist. He has written a novel, Boonville, and a play entitled The Death of Teddy Ballgame. He cowrote the films Pig Hunt and Windows on the World. He is a San Francisco Library Laureate, among other honors.

Jon Sack is a US- and UK-based artist and writer. He graduated with an MFA from Goldsmiths College in 2006, and his work has been published and covered internationally. His comic books include La Lucha, which is about violence in Juárez and the lawyers working to combat it, and Iraqi Oil For Beginners, about the complicated history of oil in Iraq.