Learning to Fall

Gr 10 Up–When 18-year-old Casey walks in on her boyfriend with another girl, she is not as heartbroken as she thinks she should be. Later, she has a chance encounter with Imogen, the girl in question, who seems like a really great person and who encourages Casey to come out to a roller derby bout. Casey, who doesn’t really have many friends, and is typically reluctant to try new things, quickly falls in love with the world of roller derby, befriending a number of league mates, and putting everything she’s got into it. She grapples with a variety of issues involving her family, responsibilities for her disabled mother, anxieties and self-doubt, identity, and sexuality as she starts to wonder if she might also be falling in love with Imogen. Just as Casey and Imogen are starting to discover their feelings for each other, Imogen, who is grappling with her parents’ homophobia, inexplicably disappears, leaving Casey to try to navigate her self-doubts on her own. This emotional coming-of-age story, set primarily in an unidentified town in England, is filled with an intersectional cast of colorful secondary characters, and centers a main character struggling with finding herself while learning to open up to others.