Preorder: One Square Mile

Infused with humor and nostalgia, these exceptionally well-crafted vignettes of coming-of-age in early 1990s multicultural America will leave you wanting more from debut author Kristin H. Sample.

Relive your own childhood with a collection of stories that perfectly capture what it is to be a messy, confused, free-thinking young woman surrounded by the eccentric characters that shape her life. Sample perfectly encapsulates the complications of her experience — complications at once unique and universal.

Kristin Sample captures the unavoidable ugliness and beauty of the female adolescent experience in One Square Mile. Readers will remember what it was like to be a maturing teen, attempting to relate to the people and actions around them in kitchens, classrooms, clubs, and bedrooms. This collection is the embodiment of the joyful awakening and ongoing confusion of growing up.

Sample’s short story collection follows Liz Bauer through key moments of her early teens and that great complicator of adolescence, the move to a new neighborhood and school and social order, as she navigates confusion and mixed messages to develop an understanding of the world that existed for young women in suburban Long Island in the 1990s. One Square Mile is both universal and unique. Readers of any generation will see something of their own experiences in Liz’s, but it is Sample’s voice that makes these stories so memorable: Liz is an insightful, compassionate, and very, very funny narrator who, with the support and love of family and friends, characters who reappear throughout, not only survives adolescence but thrives, becoming, presumably, a woman like the one who wrote these stories with such affection, self-awareness, and a knack for storytelling.

One does not so much read One Square Mile as inhabit it – again and for the first time, thanks to Sample’s attention to details that feel at once familiar and fresh. These are coming-of-age stories that so precisely evoke a particular time and place it will make you ache with longing for somewhere you’ve never really known until now.

With stunning creativity and charm, Kristin H. Sample transports us into the miraculous and complicated world of girlhood adolescence with her latest collection of short stories, One Square Mile. Following the intricate life of Elizabeth Bauer, also known as Lizzie, as she grows up on Long Island during the 1990s means contending with the vast web of relations she belongs to and how they make her who she is. Sample offers vivid snapshots of these vital communities – Lizzie’s family, school, childhood friends, and neighborhood – alongside a protagonist who toggles between restless desires for childhood and adulthood, simplicity and adventure. These stories make you want to be a child again – to see the world through eyes full of marvel and delight. Read One Square Mile. Savor it. Then share it with those you love.