Features The Big Thrill Recommends: RAINBOW BLACK by Maggie Thrash

The Big Thrill Recommends: RAINBOW BLACK by Maggie Thrash

Recommendation by Jody Gerbig

“People make other people suffer. And they don’t stop until you make them suffer.”

Maggie Thrash, most known for her award-nominated graphic novel Honor Girl, now graces us with her first adult novel, genre-defying RAINBOW BLACK. Parts mystery, suspense, queer love story, historical fiction, and dark comedy, this novel suggests that nothing is as simple as its label.

It is the 1990s and the beginning of the Satanic-panic in New Hampshire, but 13-year-old Lacey Bond’s biggest problems involve a clingy foster child who wants to be her best friend, a budding lust for women, and a strange mother she sometimes doesn’t understand. That is, until her hippie, preschool-running parents are accused of ritualized pedophilia and arrested without bond, leaving Lacey and her older sister Éclair to fend for themselves.

When the media-born frenzy takes a horrific turn, Lacey makes a choice that thrusts her into adulthood and forces her to flee home. Though her new life offers happiness and success, Lacey soon realizes that, even if they can end a single person’s aggression, they can’t stop the masses from coming for them.

A layered novel that questions identity as much as it does collective responsibility, RAINBOW BLACK offers something for any reader to love. At its core, it is a coming-of-age tale, its lovable and quirky main character embodying our own insecurities and desires to feel loved, no matter where we come from or who we become.

RAINBOW BLACK by Maggie Thrash