Rebecca Podos Books
Rebecca Podos is an American author known for her young adult novels that explore identity, relationships, and LGBTQ+ themes. She has received critical acclaim for her nuanced storytelling and authentic representation of diverse characters.
Known for: Like Water
Books by Rebecca Podos
Like Water
Rebecca Podos’s Like Water is a lyrical, emotionally intelligent young adult novel about what happens when the life you’ve inherited no longer matches the person you are becoming. Set in a small town in New Mexico, the story follows Savannah Espinoza, a Mexican American teenager whose days are shaped by family obligations, local expectations, and a future that seems to be closing in before it has truly begun. Her father’s failing health, the family restaurant, and her own complicated relationship to ambition all make leaving feel less like a choice and more like a betrayal. Then Savannah meets Leigh, a magnetic genderqueer teen whose presence unsettles her assumptions about love, identity, and possibility. What unfolds is both romance and reckoning: a coming-of-age story that treats identity not as a fixed answer but as something fluid, lived, and discovered in motion. Like Water matters because it offers rare tenderness and nuance around queer identity, family loyalty, cultural belonging, and young adulthood. Podos is especially skilled at writing characters who feel deeply real—conflicted, vulnerable, brave in uneven ways—and that authenticity gives the novel its lasting power.
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Savannah’s Boundaries: Home, Duty, and Delay
Sometimes the first barrier to self-discovery is not hostility but love that comes with strings attached. Savannah’s life is defined by closeness: a tight-knit New Mexico town, a family-run Mexican restaurant, and a home culture built on obligation, affection, and quiet sacrifice. These forces give ...
From Like Water
Leigh’s Arrival: Identity Refuses Easy Labels
A single person can change the emotional climate of your life simply by existing more freely than you do. Leigh enters Savannah’s world with confidence, humor, vulnerability, and a genderqueer identity that unsettles the rigid categories of a small town. Their presence is transformative not because ...
From Like Water
Love as a Mirror for Self-Knowing
Romance becomes meaningful when it reveals who you are, not just who you desire. In Like Water, Savannah’s growing relationship with Leigh is not framed as a simple love story that solves her problems. Instead, it acts as a mirror. Through closeness, longing, and emotional risk, Savannah is forced t...
From Like Water
Small Towns Hold and Constrain
Community can feel like shelter until it starts behaving like surveillance. One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its portrait of small-town life as both nourishing and claustrophobic. Savannah’s town is not depicted as a caricature of backwardness. It is full of history, familiarity, local ritua...
From Like Water
Family Love Is Tender and Complicated
The people who love us most can also be the people who struggle hardest to let us change. In Like Water, family is not a simple obstacle to overcome. It is a source of nourishment, memory, labor, identity, and pain. Savannah’s family, especially through the restaurant and her father’s illness, is wo...
From Like Water
Breaking Currents Through Self-Assertion
Change often begins not with a dramatic escape but with the frightening act of saying, this is who I am. As Savannah grows closer to Leigh and more aware of her own emotional truth, she begins to resist the currents that have carried her passively through life. This resistance is uneven and difficul...
From Like Water
About Rebecca Podos
Rebecca Podos is an American author known for her young adult novels that explore identity, relationships, and LGBTQ+ themes. She has received critical acclaim for her nuanced storytelling and authentic representation of diverse characters.
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Rebecca Podos is an American author known for her young adult novels that explore identity, relationships, and LGBTQ+ themes. She has received critical acclaim for her nuanced storytelling and authentic representation of diverse characters.
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