Godly Heathens

Gem Echols is a nonbinary Seminole teenager scraping through life in the tiny town of Gracie, Georgia, where they’re known as everyone’s queer awakening and use easy charm to hide the anxious person underneath.

The only one who knows the real Gem is Enzo, a trans boy a thousand miles away in Brooklyn, and even he doesn’t know about the violent, magic-soaked dreams that have always felt far too real.

When a stranger claiming to be the Goddess of Death attacks Gem, a girl named Willa Mae steps in to save their life and finally offers answers: she and Gem are reincarnated gods who have known and loved one another across many lifetimes.

But the person Gem used to be was no benevolent deity, and the enemies that past self made in the pantheon are coming, one after another, to settle old scores. As the boundaries between worlds thin and buried history surfaces, Gem learns that nearly everyone around them is hiding something, including the person they’ve been their whole life.

The first half of a contemporary fantasy duology, it pairs a sharp, queer coming-of-age voice with mythology, romance, and rising dread.