Under the Neon Sun

Unable to afford rent, Mia--a community college student--lives out of her car, cleaning houses of the well-to-do in the LA area to meet her shoestring budget. Then Covid hits, and everything changes.

For people living in houses and apartments, with stay-at-home jobs, the pandemic was inconvenient. For Mia--a student and housekeeper whose budget is so tight she lives in her car--the pandemic destroys the very source of her paltry income. Fortunately, gutsy and funny Mia is a determined survivor. After weeks of cutting her limited spending even further, missing meals along the way, her wealthy employers become desperate for her services again. This time, she’s determined not to let them take advantage of her as they have in the past. Her newfound confidence gives her new hope as she works to escape the shackles of poverty on her own terms. Sally Rooney meets Elizabeth Strout in this brilliant fiction debut.

Dr. Kate Gale is co-founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review, and she teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry. She is author of seven books of poetry including The Goldilocks Zone from the University of New Mexico Press in 2014, and Echo Light from Red Mountain in 2014 and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis, which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee. The Loneliest Girl is a testament to resilience, including its limits, a testament to the will to rise above a childhood where a girl has to sit on a seat of shame, and made to believe it is her own creation. This is the deft hand of the poet carving stone, not for the caress of water, but of the fiery blood that engraves stone. In lines with the radiance of silk on fire, Gale reveals an inner theater of transparency. These are poems that sing the world of song inside pain in a call for gentleness, for a meditative empathy toward the lonely girls in the world whose strength should inspire the searching of our own souls for what hurts us, as we see, in these poems, the courage a lonely girl must have to build the will to live.