I really enjoyed this book.

It was an exploration of growing up, of queerness, of grief; how they're all distinct yet intertwined. Beautiful prose, engaging pace, heartbreaking yet important plot points.

I shed many a tear.

✨ Review ✨ Girls Girls Girls by Shoshana von Blanckensee; Narrated by Rachel F. Hirsch & Shoshana von Blanckensee

Thanks to G.P. Putnam's Sons, PRHAudio and #netgalley for the gifted advanced copy/ies of this book!

In this lesbian coming-of-age story, Hannah flees her NYC conservative Jewish mother after high school graduation. Her and her bff and girlfriend Sam set out on a cross-country road-trip to San Francisco, to find the queer paradise that reportedly awaits there. On they arrive, to make ends meet, they start stripping at The Chez Paree, and the girls start feeling a distance growing between them. Sam makes new friends, Hannah tries to escape stripping and is struggling to make friends and fit in.

A story of the queer possibilities of SF, of making friends and found family, and grappling with familial stresses. The book seems to exist in multiple parts -- escaping NYC, finding their way in SF together, their growing as individuals, grief and family reconciliation, and finding her people in SF (I love the crew Hannah ends up finding). The book brought me so many emotions and I really loved this one!

🎧 Great narration -- immersive and emotional!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: literary fiction
Setting: 1990s NYC and SF
Length: 10 hours 49 minutes
Pub Date: Jun 17 2025

Read this if you like:
⭕️ coming-of-age stories
⭕️ 1990s queer San Francisco
⭕️ complex family dynamics
⭕️ understanding narratives of sex work

“maybe when you arent alone in your queerness, queerness is thicker than blood.”
setting is san fran in 1990s -which was genuinely such a fun setting to have! hannah is a closeted lesbian, Sam and her are in a secret relationship.honestly the queerness and the jewishness of these characters feels so real and raw i was enjoying it. these characters are def ones i will think about for a while

“Maybe when you aren’t alone in your queerness, queerness is thicker than water.”

Girls, Girls, Girls is a beautiful coming-of-age story about queerness, family, identity, grief, love, and belonging, set in 1990s San Francisco. Hannah is a closeted lesbian in her Long Island hometown, where she was raised by her mother, an increasingly religious Jew, and her beloved bubbe, who survived polio as a child, resulting in lifelong disabilities. Hannah is in a secret relationship with Sam, the only other queer she knows, and together the two girls plan their escape from Long Island through a cross-country road trip to San Francisco to start new lives openly as queers. Their new home in SF proves to be both the queer oasis they had dreamed of and a much harder reality than they had hoped for, as Sam and Hannah struggle to find work and a place to live.

I absolutely loved this debut—it’s queerness and Jewishness feel so true to the characters, the story, the setting, and to me as the reader. The events of this novel are emotionally complex and morally gray, but it is consistently earnest, loving, and imbued with care. I think readers are going to love this book, especially queer people young and old and especially queer Jews.

Thank you to Penguin Random House and NetGalley for a free eARC in exchange for my honest review.

This book felt like coming home. As a queer girl who packed her bags and moved away to a big city as a teen, I related so much to Hannah and Sam’s struggle. And honestly what lesbian hasn’t had a relationship like theirs?

Hannah was so real and such an easy protagonist to love. But what really got me was her relationship with her family. My grandmother is my favorite person in the world and we talk every day, I simply can’t imagine a world without her. As for my mother, well this year she wished me a happy pride for the first time ever. Baby steps.

This book is such a raw and real love letter to the unique experience of growing up queer. I can’t recommend it enough. What an excellent way to wrap up pride month!

A novel about two girls from Long Beach, NY growing up in the 80’s/90’s, understanding their sexuality, relationships, how to live on their own, growing apart and eventually coming back together. They keep their relationship a secret while living to NY, then move to San Francisco as soon as they graduate, leaving their friends and family behind. They make some not so great decisions, and struggle with who they are together as a couple and apart as individuals. This was very well done, beautifully written, and excellent character arcs.

Another contender for best of 2025 for me!!!

I am obsessed with this book. Literally cannot stop thinking about it. We meet Hannah, who moved out to SF with her friend Sam, who she’s in love with, to discover herself and her sexuality. She becomes a stripper, then an escort, and an interesting relationship ensues with a client and her friendship with Sam is affected. Then, grandma has news that makes Hannah rethink some things, and good grief there were just so many tears. This book was raw as hell. I just loved it so much.

this is a time capsule of a book. set in the summer of 1996, it captures that strange liminal space right before the internet began flattening everything - before memes, before constant discourse, before culture lost its distinct fingerprints. reading this felt like dipping into a preserved moment, a slice of the last analog decade, full of longing and grit and static.

this book follows hannah, an 18-year-old jewish girl fleeing her small, conservative hometown for san francisco with her best friend and secret girlfriend, sam. they're in love and broke and aching for a life where they can be queer out loud. what they find instead is a city that demands everything of them: their labor, their bodies, their identities. hannah starts stripping to pay rent, then eventually agrees to sleep with an older butch lesbian, chris, for money - not because she's desperate, but possibly because she's drawn to her, or because survival is never just about income. the book doesn't always explain these choices, and while i like messy characters, some moments felt underbaked. things just happened without emotional grounding.

the writing skews young, which makes sense given hannah's age, but i found myself wishing for a slightly older, more layered voice. the story touches so many themes - sex work, grief, identity, addiction, friendship, bodily autonomy - but most are explored on a surface level. not quite shallow, but not as emotionally nuanced as they could have been.

still, there's power here. grief runs through every part of the book: hannah's estrangement from her mother and sister, her fear of losing her bubbe, her slow realization that love doesn't always equal safety. there's grief in watching her lose pieces of herself to survive. she wants to get out of sex work, but can't afford to. the jobs she's qualified for don't pay a living wage. she's queer, jewish, barely an adult, and living in one of the most expensive cities in the country.

the supporting cast is one of the book's strengths. billie, a house painter hannah works with, is endlessly kind and nonjudgmental about her sex work. sam, her girlfriend, explores polyamory and queer community in ways that sometimes feel modernized for the setting - there's a cringey moment where she implies polyamory is resisting the patriarchy, which might be true but doesn't totally fit the 1996 vibe. april, the friend they left behind in new york, finds sobriety and joy in unexpected places. and chris, the much older woman hannah sleeps with, is both compelling and disturbing. she's grieving her own mother, drinking herself hollow, and clearly crossing lines. hurt people hurt people.

this book is full of messed up people doing messed up things because they're messed up. i like that vibe. i just wish it had dug deeper into the why.

in the end, girls girls girls is about love in its messiest forms - romantic, familial, chosen. it's about the impossibility of growing up without wounds, and the responsibility to stop those wounds from becoming weapons. it's good. it could have been great. but i'm still glad it exists.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Group Putnam for the eARC.

This book really worked on all levels for me. I loved the characters and the journey they took, the heartbreak and the happy moments. It was lovely.

Liked but didn’t love, and I can’t quite figure out why! A Jewish lesbian coming of age story, so on principle this should’ve been a top book of the year for me. I think Hannah’s relationships with Sam and Amber, especially as they are complicated and challenged and revisited toward the end of the novel, comprised the book’s emotional core for me at least — less so the cross-country journey, the stripping, Hannah’s building of her own life or navigation of her family dynamics, which for some reason felt less *real*. Which is odd, because those things are indeed vital to the project of this book and the arc of the plot and of Hannah’s growth. Not fully sure what to make of that yet.

Girls Girls Girls is a lively and engaging read that offers a fresh take on female friendship and self-discovery. The characters are relatable and well-drawn, capturing the messy, hilarious, and sometimes heartfelt moments of young women finding their way. The writing has a breezy, conversational tone that makes the story fun to dive into, though a few plot points felt a bit predictable. Still, it’s a feel-good book with enough depth to keep you hooked. Perfect for anyone looking for a witty and relatable coming-of-age story.

Girls Girls Girls is one of the best debut novels I've ever read. Definitely didn't expect or intend to read it in one sitting, but it grabbed me by the collar and forced me to continue. All the characters are so real, so perceptively written, and they compel you to ache and cry and laugh for them. Hannah and her family unit - mom, Bubbe, and sister Rachel - felt so authentic in their messiness and flaws and overall their love for one another. I particularly appreciated how lovingly the queer community was painted here. I adored this glimpse of San Francisco in the 90's, the queens and dykes who populated the Castro, all the butches and studs and queers we meet. I loved watching Hannah come into her own, and I could've read her story forever, but I felt it ended at the perfect place. Thanks to PRH and NetGalley for the e-ARC; available June 16!

A refreshingly realistic coming of age novel, set in San Francisco circa 1996. I loved how gritty and real our characters felt, nothing was romanticized and that kept me really engaged and rooting for Hannah. A very unique take and welcome addition to our LGTQ literature.

Girls Girls Girls by Shoshana von Blanckensee was a wonderful queer coming of age.
The characters draw you in and keeps you flipping the pages.
The characters were all realistic and very well developed.
I really enjoyed the writing style. I found myself hooked, turning the pages.

This was a really fascinating book. I was quickly drawn into the characters' lives and relationships and I was very interested in seeing where the story was going. The interpersonal conflicts were set up so well and made for a good amount of tension in the narrative that really aided in driving the story forward. The momentum was well balanced and I found myself really connecting with the story.
As things progressed, I was really intrigued by the circumstances that Hannah (the FMC) found herself in and seeing the internal conflict she had--especially in confluence with Sam and their opposing ideas for how to handle and approach life in California. Seeing Hannah dive deeper and deeper into trying to find her own place, struggling with her identities, and trying to see how to make her relationship work while still learning so much about herself was really fascinating and made for a really compelling read. And I think the narrative balanced all the different layers of the story really well. And by the end, the emotional pay off was really well. Even with some plot points that were more predictable, I thought everything landed well and made for an enjoyable read. There was a lot of the story that was raw and vulnerable and made room for a lot of character growth and overall development by the end.

I will say, I was...surprised at how few consequences there really were throughout the story. Hannah and Sam take a lot of big risks--and there are even times when they are warned of danger--but everyone largely comes out unscathed (apart from a line being crossed between Hannah and Chris, and even that felt to be downplayed too much). But between the risky careers, drug use, random late nights and hook ups, there is surprisingly few consequences. And while I did not want there to be any consequences, I felt like the book sort of glosses over the very real risks that these two young girls take and almost glamorizes several areas that I think could have (at least) added a lot of nuance to the story and could have been a conversation starter for making safer choices and/or why, for many people, it doesn't feel like safe choices are an option. Especially being set in a much less accepting and progressive time.
There were sections where I felt tension rising and an almost impending doom, and I think that if I had known that I didn't need to worry, I wouldn't have been waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop and I could have just focused more on the narrative at hand.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Group Putnam and G.P. Putnam's Sons for providing me with a digital review copy of this story in exchange for an honest review.

Girls Girls Girls immerses readers in the 1990s-from Long Beach, NY, to gritty San Francisco. Shoshana von Blanckensee captures the queer nightlife, the countercultural energy of the Mission District, and the rawness of the city as seen through the eyes of the teenage MCs. The setting is an important, vivid part of this book. Those who lived through the 1990s might even appreciate it more. It's also an age when being queer came with less understanding and more violence. San Francisco was Mecca.
I thought I'd be reading more about a WLW relationship, but instead I was drawn in by Hannah's relationship with her Bubbe. We all deserve to have someone like that in our lives.
Not everything is hunky-dory though- prepare for conflict, drugs, death, estrangements, and sex work. This book isn't overly emotional or sentimental, but it does present some harsh truths. I think it still offers hope, even if it's not your usual happy-ever-after.
#NetGalley

A really moving coming of age debut story set in the 90s featuring a gay Jewish girl and her high school girlfriend who leave home for adventure and the queer scene of San Francisco. Emotional, relatable and heartfelt. This was both a great intergenerational family story, a Sapphic romance, a story of female friendship and a look at the early LGBTQIA/Aids scene in SF. Highly recommended for fans of books like Shopgirls by Jessica Anya Blau or Last night at the Telegraph Club by Melinda Lo. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early digital copy and @prhaudio for a complimentary ALC in exchange for my honest review.

CW: drug use, sexual assault, alcohol addiction, sex work, death of a loved one from cancer

"Where is home? It's nowhere, which means it could be anywhere. It's wherever I am. I'm home"

Girls Girls Girls is a heartfelt, compelling coming-of-age story following Hannah, a young queer Jewish woman growing up in 90s Long Beach, NY. At 18, Hannah leaves home for San Francisco with Sam, her best friend and first love, and navigates early adulthood in a new place of freedom and opportunity, challenge and heartbreak. Her story captures so much, from friendships and first loves, family relationships, self-exploration and identity, religion, grief, and love. All of the characters and relationships are developed so well and feel very real and powerful. There is so much emotion and depth packed into this story of a young woman searching for herself and place to feel at home.

CW: drug use, addiction, sex work, sexual assault, cancer death, homophobia

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Group Putnam for the advance review copy!

This was a great read to see the physical and mental journey that the girls take on during their trip. It shows the effects of our choices.

This was a well-executed queer coming of age, with a writing style and reading experience reminiscent of Stone Butch Blues. It captured the queer experience of the 90s with attention to detail that made the read feel very authentic.