Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky: A raw, emotional novel of recovery and familial reckoning by Skylar Lyralen Kaye Book Tour with Author Interview

 

BLOG TOUR

Book Title: Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky

Author and Publisher: Skylar Lyralen Kaye

Cover Artist: 100 Covers

Release Date: January 2, 2025

Third person/Past tense/Single POV

Genres: Literary Queer Fiction

Tropes: Recovery, family dysfunction, queer friendships

Themes: Mother/daughter, homecoming, recovery

Length: 68 000 words/234 pages

Heat Rating: 3 flames

It is a standalone book and does not end on a cliffhanger.

Goodreads

Buy Links 

Amazon US   |  Amazon UK 

B&N  |  Walmart  |  Kobo

A reluctant prodigal queer daughter returns to her dysfunctional alcoholic family and struggles to climb out of her familiar role of savior.

Blurb 

Erin has spent the last six years abroad, teaching English in Spain, France, Japan. Now, she’s back home in Maine for Christmas, for the first time in years. Her abusive father, Thomas, made it clear that Erin, a lesbian, was not welcome in the house, but her mother, Janet, recently ended the marriage, then invited Erin to come home for the holiday. “Just us three girls,” says Janet, including Erin’s younger sister, sixth grader Beth—though Thomas tends to show up at night drunk and sit in his car in front of the house. Erin bickers with Janet even as she helps her mother get on her feet—setting her up a bank account, making her a resume to apply for jobs—but when it becomes clear her father is trying to reconcile, Erin—who isn’t ready to forgive—leaves for Mexico. She takes a bus to Arizona, where her drinking and her guilt over abandoning Beth get the better of her. She stops in Tucson to attend some Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. With the help of her no-nonsense sponsor, Maggie, Erin attempts to make sense of her life up to this point, beginning with the tumult of her parents’ marriage. As Janet plans to come down to Tucson to visit her, Erin must consider the possibility that she didn’t have one abusive parent, but two. Kaye captures Erin’s complex emotional journey with elegant, salt-of-the-earth economy. “They have a saying about people who keep running away,” Janet tells Erin at one point. “Things catch up with you sooner or later.” While many aspects of Erin’s situation and her reactions to it—substance abuse, sabotaged love, solo travel, motorcycles—may strike the reader as slightly predictable, Kaye fashions her in such a way that she feels like an individual rather than a cliche. It’s a breezy read despite the dark subject matter, and the reader quickly gets swept up in Erin’s redemptive saga.

KIRKUS REVIEWS
Our verdict: Get it!
A raw, emotional novel of recovery and familial reckoning. 
A reluctant prodigal daughter returns to her dysfunctional family in Kaye’s debut literary novel.
It’s a breezy read despite the dark subject matter, and the reader quickly gets swept up in Erin’s redemptive saga.

MELIZA BANALES, Lambda Award Finalist

Skylar Lyralen Kaye’s “Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky” is a striking and rebellious coming of age story. With every pit stop, AA meeting, and second chance Kaye’s raw portrayal of Erin—a complex survivor turned adventurer— offers a snapshot of a young Queer finding her way through trauma and leaving room for hope, even in the most unexpected places. 

TINA D’ELIA, Award-winning poet and Solo Performer
Riveting and timely! In Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky Erin, a young world traveler returns home, where ghosts, family, and unexpected arrivals challenge her in ways to which any reader can relate. Erin travels through lovers’ beds, desert skies, and looming memories in this novel of relationship cliffhangers.

Excerpt 

Erin stood in the school hallway, shaken out of the six years of her life in Spain, France, and Japan by her mother’s voice. She could feel the moment like a snapshot, a stilled image before everything shifted away from her toward an end she couldn’t see. Until now, Erin had told herself it was easy to endure her mother’s hostility on her yearly visits, easy to stay with friends and sneak to see her sister, and easy, always, to leap again onto the wide sweep of road she’d taken to get away from home.  In the beginning of December, the secretary at the language institute in Madrid where Erin taught English had come into an empty classroom and handed her a message. She stood dumbfounded at first, blonde eyelashes shading her pale blue eyes, almost too shocked to recognize her mother’s name. She had looked at the secretary’s dark skin, into her darker eyes, before turning to the classroom window. Fumes from the cars blew up from the street; the gray Madrid sky shifted so a brief glimpse of light slipped through as if by mistake. She opened the note. It said to call whenever she could. Now.

The secretary waited. Erin extended her lower lip and exhaled, blowing up the bangs that hung over her forehead. She spoke in her native American. “Shit,” she said. “What does she want?” She stuffed the note in the pocket of her Oxford shirt and spun so fast her long red gold braid flew over her shoulder with a soft thud.Halfway out the door she stopped and turned around. The white blue of her attention washed over the secretary, bathed her and held her up as Erin smiled an apology, her face changing from bone-hard to a gentle mirth, as if she and the 

shared a secret, as if they were the only people in the world. The secretary had smiled back. People usually did.

Erin walked around with the message in the pockets of different shirts for almost a week. She’d didn’t want to zoom on her iPad; her mother didn’t know she had one. She’d dumped her last burner—too many women calling after one-night stands—so she could truthfully email her mother and say she didn’t have a phone and didn’t plan to get one. After all, she didn’t plan. She usually just procrastinated for a week or two between burners. She’d avoided her mother’s calls as she did those of the stalker women. The sound of her mother’s voice sent stitches of cold threading through her stomach. She didn’t want to call back.

Author Interview:

Let’s start by telling us, in twenty words, or less, what your book is about.

Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky is about a young queer world traveler who struggles to save her family and ends finding a truer family of choice.

What was it that led you to write in the genre(s) you write? 

I write in many genres—novel, memoir, plays, screenplays and poetry. I fell in love with language itself in reading James Baldwin, so I got degrees that made me a queer literary writer.

Are your books character led, plot led, or both? 

Both. Who the character is determines the plot, and the books have a strong arc.

What is your favourite part of the writing process? 

I love all of it! My favorite part is when I see a new way of expressing something—when I surprise myself and discover new techniques almost by accident.

What is your least favourite part of the writing process? 

Getting feedback. Only because it can be unskillful. When it’s on, it’s great.

Where do you get your inspiration for your characters?  

Almost always from life—people I know or have known.

Tell us a little about the characters in your book and their story.

 Erin, the main character, is a lesbian in her mid-twenties who lives as an ex-patriot with no ties—she even uses burner phones she dumps every time a woman gets too serious about her. The only person she’s close to is her best friend, nonbinary Sully, who always falls for older women who leave them. Erin grew up in an abusive home, which she left as soon as she could. Her blonde and conventionally pretty mother, Janet, conservative in her outlook more than her politics, stayed loyal to her abusive husband until the opening of the book, when she found the courage to boot him. But Erin’s father gets drunk and either sits outside in his car or tries to break in, so Janet asks Erin to come home and protect both her and Erin’s younger sister Beth. The beginning is about the costs of such protection, and the wild fluctuations of emotion and behavior as Erin loses control of herself in trying to serve her family. This propels her into another escape that doesn’t work. It’s the not working that transforms the story into one of redemption and connection, even if Erin doesn’t find all the change she seeks.

If you could have one wish what would it be?  

An to Trump’s leadership, fascism and right wing populism followed by an intense commitment to equality and care for the earth. (You asked!)

What's your deepest fear? 

Ending up in a concentration camp like the immigrants ICE has abducted. (I’m living in Portugal right now!)

If I came to dinner what would you feed me? 

I would find out your favorite foods and make some version of them…probably organic, probably with some kind of fresh herb upgrade if possible.

Which of your characters would you like to be sharing the dinner table with us? Definitely Sully! They are so funny and loving.

Tell us in the character’s own words, what he/she would have to say about you.

 From Sully: It’s a damn good thing that Skye now foregrounds nonbinary and trans people in their work. About time on that coming out, Skye!

What would they say (again in their own words) about themselves, and their story that will make us want to read about it? 

Sully again: Erin is my best friend because they will go to the end of the fucking earth if you need her. Seriously. All that badass sleeping around bullshit is just a cover for a stupidly big heart. At least as big as mine. The sequel to this book is when I make them take me on a world tour of all the queerest places in the world and we surprisingly don’t fucking fall for each other because what a cliché!

Which other fictional character(s) would you like to be present at the dinner party? Lisbeth Salandar, Shane from the L Word, Kasta and Bitterblue (from Kristin Cashore) and Liza Bennett from Jane Austen (just to see how she’d react to all the queerness).

What other authors would you say have either influenced your writing or you would like to emulate? 

I have been most influenced by James Baldwin. His prose is so gorgeous, and his vision both so queer, so wise about race and so wide in scope. I have also been influenced by Shonda Rimes and the Wakowski’s. Both of them have changed the scope of what inclusion means. And I love the humor and absurdity in Rimes’ work.

Which character from literature would you most like to have created? 

It’s a toss up between Merlin and Lisbeth Salander. I’d like to create a nonbinary merging of the two.

What do you prefer writing? A one off novel, a series, or short stories? 

I prefer long form, so a novel. I haven’t written a series for prose, but in writing film, I really liked writing a series.

What kind of books do you enjoy reading? 

I love literary queer fantasy and sci fi. I adore Kristin Cashore’s work, which gets queerer all the time.

Where do you see yourself personally and professionally in 5 years’ time? 

Making social justice queer content for theatre, film and the page…performing a solo show!

Do you have any other projects we should look out for? 

Yes!

Assigned Female at Birth, a Queer Web Series, Season 3 just released on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/anothercountrytv

Bachelorx, a Nonbinary Memoir, to be released soon

Priest Kid, a novella available on Amazon

About the Author  

Skylar Lyralen Kaye, fae/they is a queer social justice and award-winning writer as well as a lifelong activist. They have a BA in English from the University of Arizona and an MFA in Theater from Sarah Lawrence College. They were nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Fiction in 1997 and were a finalist for the 2005 Massachusetts Cultural Council of the Arts Awards in Playwriting. They have published in literary journals such as Calyx, Persona, Phoebe, Girlfriends, Happy Magazine and the anthology Out of the Ordinary, Children of LGT Parents as well as winning the Boston Amazon Poetry slam finals and performing on the slam team.  Their foray into filmmaking brought awards that include the 2021 NE Film Star Award as well as 12 film festival awards for the web series Assigned Female at Birth. In theater, they won 2018 Best in Fringe at the San Francisco Fringe for the one person show My Preferred Pronoun Is We, in 2017 the Moth Story Slam and 2018 the Boston Story Slam. Some other awards include: the 2015 Meryl Streep Writers Lab for Screenwriters and the 2002 Stanley and Eleanor Lipkin Prize in Playwriting. Kaye’s memoir, Bachelorx, will be released in 2026 For a complete list of awards and credits please visit https://lyralenkaye.com/

Author Links

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