Long Island Girls (publication day June 23, 2026) is Gabrielle Korn’s first foray into historical / literary fiction from her previous two novels, The Shutouts and Yours for the Taking, which were speculative, near-future, fiction.
The novel primarily follows 17-year old Susan, beginning in 2005, where she and her best friend Katie live on Long Island and are juniors in high school. They’re not popular, but artsy, and music snobs, into indie bands. At an all-ages show for the trendy band ?? (called “what-what”), she and Katie are accompanied by Jake, Katie’s boyfriend, Kyle, Susan’s former crush, and a girl from the next town over who Kyle brings along, called Eliza. Eliza looks familiar in a way they can’t place — she looks like she’d be popular, and after Susan meets Jonny, the lead singer of ??, who is gay and thinks she is queer, which she hadn’t really acknowledged to herself, after driving Eliza home Susan realizes that she is a lesbian and wants to kiss Eliza.
The narrative picks up 5 years later, after Susan is done with college and while she’s an assistant at an indie rock label. She is out as a lesbian, has been in contact with Jonny, who got her this job, but it’s horrible, with a harassing man in charge. She loves working in the music industry, but everything else is awful. She’s commuting from home on Long Island, which doesn’t let her have much of a social life. She continues to think about Eliza and thinks she sees her on the train, writes a Missed Connections ad for Craigslist but never hears back. She dates a horrible woman who blames Susan for something she did herself but is a mesmerizing artist.
Now in 2015, Susan has moved to Brooklyn and is not an assistant any more–she’s been promoted to social media manager, and is obsessed with the dating apps. One day, she matches with Eliza in Brooklyn–and it’s actually her! They have a short-lived, intense affair, but something that happened to Eliza while they were in high school still haunts her.
Five years later and it’s 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and Susan has moved back to Long Island with her parents. She’s left the label and is trying to make it on her own as a social media marketer. She’s hired by someone to promote an independent film, and is flown out to Los Angeles, where she finds that someone . . . is Eliza, now married to a male psychotherapist. Turns out they both were very important to each other but that maybe they weren’t supposed to have a romance. They are better friends and business partners–because Susan has an idea for Eliza’s film.
It’s really character-driven, about Susan’s growth through each era, and how she and Eliza keep coming together and apart and the importance they each had in each others’ lives. Plus Eliza was taken advantage of as a teenager in a way that was new in 2005. It’s about technology, and patriarchy, and how a couple of women can forge their own independence. I loved it!
I consider it weight-neutral; although Eliza is described as hot several times, there’s not a lot of description of how she’s hot. Although Susan is described as thin, later in the book she has a “more rounded” form after the pandemic, and she acknowledges that she’s OK with and likes it.
Reading While Fat 