Cover Art: Alban Fischer
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback | December 15, 2022
ISBN 978-1-936919-90-1
Recognition for Girls Like Me (Book One in this YA Series):
Golden Crown Literary Award 2018 YA Winner
LAMBDA Literary Award YA Finalist
Washington State Book Award YA Finalist
About Three Queerdos and a Baby
After discovering she’s pregnant weeks after the tragic death of her sweetheart, Banjo Logan finds herself caught in a downward spiral of despair, confusion, and denial. Now at seventeen, Banjo is a new mom and determined to create a life for herself and her baby. She finds help in the form of a multi-generational pack of queer misfits and grown-up teenage moms. Navigating normal teenage rites of passage like first dances, new love, and existential dread while also facing the ups and downs of new motherhood with its leaky breasts, hormonal mood swings, and baby’s first smile, Banjo begins to find her way. Equal parts heartbreaking and hilarious Three Queerdos and a Baby takes the reader on a wild ride through the often hidden world of queer youth and teenage parents as it offers a coming-of-age story for a new generation who sees gender as a kaleidoscope and the future as an impossibility.
About Nina Packebush
NINA PACKEBUSH is a queer-identified, grown-up teen mama. She is the author of two YA novels, Girls Like Me, Winner of the 2018 Golden Crown Literary Award for YA, Finalist of LAMBDA Literary Award for YA, Finalist of Washington State Book Award for YA, and its sequel, Three Queerdos and a Baby (YesYes Books, 2022). She loves her dogs, hiking, digging in the dirt, and making comic zines about empowered snails. Nina lives in the Pacific Northwest with her partner, a collection of kids, and a pack of wayward pets.
Three Queerdos and a Baby
Available Now!
Three Queerdos and a Baby, the second volume in Nina Packebush's groundbreaking YA series as it is also a stand alone novel, follows Banjo, a queer teen mom (the first ever queer teen mom to be represented in YA fiction!), as she navigates grief, motherhood, her developing self with support from her family, friends, and partner while surviving a world that is hostile to who she is.
Praise for Girls Like Me
The novel explores the effects of trauma, teenage pregnancy, transnational adoption, and the power of queer community from a radical perspective that challenges the status quo. Girls Like Me is an affirmation for those who rarely get to see themselves represented in ways that not only accept, but value the distinctive characteristics that make them who they are.
—Ariel Gore
"It’s not just that I couldn’t put it down and that I felt I was physically there with Banjo and her friends every minute of their journey through adolescence, their search for their identity and their increasing awareness of themselves and the world, but also that this story is 'singing my song' of girls like us who have or will traverse a similar journey and who desperately need this book. Stunningly important."
—Katherine Arnoldi, author, The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom and All Things Are Labor
“Nina Packebush’s Girls Like Me makes visible an invisible, necessary story—that of a pregnant teen wrestling with gender, grief, desire, and transformation. Packebush’s narrator Banjo is utterly real and refreshingly complex. We are compelled to stick with her as she and her quirky cast of misfit friends navigate the terrain of queer adolescence with humor and grit. An essential book for this generation of young adults.”
— Jacks McNamara, co-founder of the Icarus Project and author of Inbetweenland
"From page one, Girls Like Me is a novel that grips onto your mind and heart and won’t let go. Nina Packebush has created a world equal parts tragedy and magic that illuminates what it’s like to be a queer teen searching for love and belonging on the margins of heteronormative society. Through the unfolding of Banjo’s story, Packebush humanizes the struggles that queer and gender non-conforming youth face – very real and understandable struggles that are often wrongly pathologized in our mental health system as 'illness.' Packebush also does not shy away from traditionally taboo topics such as self-harm and suicide, creating a much-needed opportunity for youth to explore subjects that are so rarely discussed with honesty. Her stories also poignantly illustrate how our deepest healing happens in relationships with those we love and trust. This is a book that I dearly wish I had been around when I was a disaffected teen struggling with suicide and mental health issues."
—Leah Harris, poet, storyteller, and intersectional activist
