American Library Association Rainbow Book List
2nd Place Rainbow Book Award Transgender Fiction
‘Roving Pack’ is set in an underground world of homeless queer teens. The stories follow the daily life of Click, a straight-edge transgender kid searching for community, identity, and connection amidst chaos. As the stories unfold, we meet a pack of newly sober gender rebels creating art, families and drama in dilapidated punk houses across Portland, Oregon. Roving Pack offers fast-paced in-your-face accounts of leather, sex, hormones, house parties, and protests. But, when gender fluidity takes an unexpected turn, the pack is sent reeling.
Advanced Praise for Roving Pack:
“Bittersweet, engrossing, richly textured and redolent of truth – a harrowing but incredibly rewarding read.”
-S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You)
“Roving Pack is a rough and tumble, tender-hearted novel that grips you in its teeth and won’t let go. A satisfying debut by a writer to watch.”
– Zoe Whittall (Holding Still For As Long As Possible, Bottle Rocket Hearts)
“ Remember that time in your life when you had just escaped the terror of childhood to create your own path in the world, maybe a queer path of chosen family, desire and love and lust and intimacy on your own terms, remember all the joyful pains and painful joys you were discovering? Roving Pack nails that bold and precarious time with a precision so rare it’s almost claustrophobic in its intimacy. It’s about a specific culture and place and moment – transmasculine queer punk kids in Portland in the early-2000s – but it’s also about the transition to self-actualization in all of our lives, and the scary and heartbreaking reality that often the pack mentality required for belonging in our new communities leaves us stranded. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a book that explores the intoxication and viciousness of peer pressure in queer lives with such candor. Goddamn this book is brave — I can’t wait to see the havoc it wreaks.”
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, Nobody Passes)
“Sassafras Lowrey is so much more than one or the other anything. Ze is for sure a vital voice of hir generation, expressing as ze does, many mutually exclusive points of view on politically and emotionally live wire subjects. So, much to my delight, I find hir work filled with mischief, mayhem, and multiple meanings.”
Kate Bornstein (My Gender Workbook, 101 Alternatives To Suicide for Teens Freaks and Other Outlaws, Gender Outlaws: The Next Genderation)
“Fucking A. Sassafras Lowrey takes ‘queer punk’ to a whole new level of insidious drama. Roving Pack cracks out the microscope to examine this Portland-based scene circa 2002 – whether or not the rest of the world can take it. My guess? Hella no!”
Kristyn Dunnion (The Dirt Chronicles and Mosh Pit)
“Sassafras Lowery brings us a tale of gender defiance, in a universe struggling to be defiant. Roving Pack introduces us to the whirlwind queer subcultures of Portland, OR in 2002; and the dizzying effects of fighting against the world at war, and the gender binary. Lowery takes us on a journey through dilapidated punk houses, sexual revelation, donut-filled dumpsters, cluttered bedrooms, and the ever-changing struggle to embrace your gender identity, through your own definitions.”
CRISTY C. ROAD (Bad Habits, Spit & Passion)
“An outsider among outsiders, Roving Pack’s deeply innocent and delightfully freaky narrator Click discovers that the expansive wisdom of heart beats the narrow logic of the pack. Lowrey’s novel champions a risky queerness that resists commodification.”
Anna Joy Springer (The Vicious Red Relic, Love)
“Sassafras Lowrey is an urgent and vital voice in contemporary queer literature and with Roving Pack, a harrowing, hilarious and hip page-turner, ze takes the reader along for a wild and wonderful ride through a blossoming young queer culture that’s expanding how we experience gender, express love and create community. “
Charles Rice-González (CHULITO, FROM MACHO TO MARIPOSA: NEW GAY LATINO LITERATURE)