The Golden Season: A Novel

by Madeline Kay Sneed

Overview

How do you love a place that doesn’t love you back?

Emmy Quinn is West Texas through and through: her roots run deep in the sleepy small town of Steinbeck, where God sees all and football is king. She loves her community, but she knows that when she comes out as a lesbian, she may not be able to call Steinbeck—which is steeped in the Southern Baptist tradition—home anymore.

After a disastrous conversation with her dad, Emmy meets Cameron, a charismatic, whip-smart grad student from Massachusetts who hates everything Texas. But Texas is in Emmy's blood. Can she build a future with a woman who can't accept the things that make Emmy who she is?

Steve Quinn has just been offered his dream job as head coach of the struggling high school football team, the Steinbeck 'Stangs. The board thinks he can win them a state championship for the first time—but they tell him he can’t accept the position if he's got any skeletons in his closet. Steve is still wrestling with Emmy's coming-out: he loves his daughter, but he’s a man of faith, raised in the Baptist community. How can God ask him to choose between his dreams and his own daughter?

This lush, gorgeously written debut is a love letter to the places we call home and asks how we grapple with a complicated love for people and places that might not love us back—at least, not for who we really are. The Golden Season is a powerful examination of faith, queerness and the deep-seated bonds of family, and heralds the arrival of a striking new voice in fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781525899836
Publisher:	Graydon House Books
Publication date:	05/31/2022
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	693,891
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Madeline Kay Sneed was born and raised in Houston, Texas, a city she dearly loves, despite its sports franchises so often breaking her heart. She received her BA in English literature from Baylor University and her MFA in fiction from Emerson College. She frequently writes about the intersection of queerness and faith, an obsession of hers. When she's not doing that, Madeline loves spending time outside with her friends and family in Texas.

Editorial Reviews

"Madeline Sneed's debut novel is a breathtaking rise-and-cheer touchdown. It's about growing up, coming out, and standing tough for what your heart knows is true, but it's also a tender, magnanimous love letter to a place where family, faith, and football are the holy trinity and wildflowers bloom for miles under an endless blue sky. I wish I could read it for the first time all over again."—Julia Glass, author of Vigil Harbor and the National Book Award–winning Three Junes



"Madeline Kay Sneed has written a Friday Night Lights for a new generation, a heartfelt story of finding yourself, coming out, and coming home...A tender, bighearted exploration of family, first love, and faith, with a gorgeously evoked west Texas landscape as backdrop." —Sarah McCraw Crow, author of The Wrong Kind of Woman

"The Golden Season is about Texas, football, God and coming out—and it’s told through the story of Emmy and Steve, a daughter and father who love each other fiercely but end up in different worlds. Read it. It’ll sweep you up, make you laugh and cry, and leave you wiser about the fissures that divide America as well as families. Madeline Kay Sneed is a blazing talent." —Mako Yoshikawa, author of One Hundred and One Ways and Once Removed



"[A] gorgeous, thoughtful debut novel...vivid, layered and ultimately satisfying."—ShelfAwareness

“The changing seasons make a perfect backdrop for this timeless story of family, acceptance, and love.”—Booklist

From the Publisher

12/01/2021

Emilia "Emmy" Quinn loves all things West Texas, including football. She has also just come out to her separated parents, which could create problems in her Southern Baptist community and especially for her father, who has been offered a plum coaching job but is told he must reveal anything in his life that could be deemed problematic. Complicating matters, Emmy has just met the cutest, smartest grad student, but Cameron is from Massachusetts—and she hates Texas! With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal