The playful and poignant novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) sifts through a queer trans woman's unrequited love for her straight trans friend who died. A queer love letter steeped in desire, grief, and delight, the story is interspersed with encyclopedia entries about a fictional TV show set on an isolated island.
The experimental form functions at once as a manual for how pop culture can help soothe and mend us and as an exploration of oft-overlooked sources of pleasure, including karaoke, birding, and butt toys. Ultimately, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) reveals with glorious detail and emotional nuance the woman the narrator loved, why she loved her, and the depths of what she has lost.
"Grief is a process that encompasses the death of the past and of future possibility. Despite this, Little Blue Encyclopedia is an undeniably optimistic text, one that takes up mournful subject matter and suggests ways it can be worked through." —Quill & Quire, starred review
"Little Blue Encyclopedia understands perfectly how pop culture — and pop culture fandom — can become bound up in our lives inextricably. As the narrator assembles her encyclopedia, memories of Vivian when she was alive start to trickle into the text. Sometimes the narrator is conscious of those memories taking over, and sometimes it happens almost without her having to try."—Vox
"If we mourn for too long, society might tell us that we’re wrong, that it’s time to move on, get over it, but this book shows, at least at times, that it’s actually conventional wisdom that is misguided. Since Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), at its core, is about nothing more or less than the fact that the narrator still loves and is still grieving, both emotions intertwined with the difficulties of survival." — Jacob Wren, Montreal Review of Books
"Vancouver author Hazel Jane Plante’s quirky, queer debut destined to be a cult classic." —Toronto Star
"The last time I read a novel with such a startling, original, winning first-person narrator was Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness."— Paul Headrick, Ormsby Review
Hazel Jane Plante is a librarian, cat photographer, and writer. Her debut novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) received the 32nd Annual Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction. She also releases music under the name lo-fi lioness and helms the podcast t4t, which is about writing while trans.She currently lives in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
