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“Women I know very well. Like a southern version of Patience & Sarah. Deeply satisfying and emotionally resonant.” – Dorothy Allison, National Book Award Finalist, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cave Dweller 

“Jodie Taylor is growing up queer, poor and white in the rural south in the 1960’s.  She is also the headstrong and compelling protagonist in Pat Spear’s wonderful novel It’s Not Like I Knew Her. Spears doesn’t shy away from the realities of race, sexuality and class bigotry. But this gritty, complex, character- driven story is Jodie’s.  Rarely have I been so taken by a personality in a novel as I have been by the stubborn, broken generous Jodie Taylor. Spears knows how to dress the working poor. She wraps their flesh and blood bodies in work and lets them build their own worlds from all the strength and frailty that is human. Jodie refuses to succumb to a series of bad breaks and bad choices. She holds fiercely to her dream of a world where she can love women, return to the challenges of her troubled past, and play basketball hard and fast enough to win the game and make a living. All the characters in this book are engaging, but Jodie especially seems so real I feel like I knew her.”  ―Sally Bellerose, author of The Girls Club

Jesse McKnight wakes to find that his wife has vanished with only a vague note declaring that she has done so in search of “something better.”  Her departure thrusts Jesse into the role of reluctant single parent, and his clumsy attempts to bridge years of emotional absence only further alienate his three children.  It’s his daughter Katie’s dream of owning a horse, coupled with Jesse’s imagined redemption, that leads him to purchase, sight unseen from a brutal owner, a mustang mare. The mare has been removed from the only place she’s ever known.  Jesse has managed to hold onto his home but almost nothing else.  When their lives intersect, they become each other’s best hope for regaining what they’ve lost.

“… You could call Dream Chaser a modern literary cowboy drama with western stereotypes turned on their heads.” – Tricia Booker, My Left Hook