Long Island Girls

• Author: Gabrielle Korn
• Genre: Literary Fiction
• Publication Date: June 23, 2026
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for providing me with an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

A sharply observed, deeply nostalgic coming-of-age story set against the indie music scene of the early 2000s.

It’s 2005, and Susan is barreling down the Long Island Expressway driving a car full of friends to an indie rock show. Eliza is a surprise addition in the backseat—unexpected, out of place, and impossible to ignore. Their connection is immediate, electric, and complicated from the start, shadowed by the kind of small-town rumors that have a way of sticking. As quickly as they come together, they part.

As Susan moves from Long Island to Brooklyn, from college to the insular world of indie labels, she begins to carve out a life in music, and the future she always dreamed of. Yet the scene that once felt like home reveals its limits, forcing her to confront who gets to belong, who gets to create, and what it costs to stay.

When Susan and Eliza reconnect years later, the pull between them hasn’t faded—but neither have the unresolved histories that first drove them apart. As past and present collide, Susan is caught between two worlds—where she’s from, and where she’s trying to go.

Moving between the raw intensity of youth and the clarity of hindsight, Long Island Girls captures the ache of growing up, the messiness and joy of queer identity, and the way music, memory, and desire shape who we become.

Having spent most of my life living on Long Island, I always get excited to read books set on the island. Very few are set in areas that I know well, but this one feels like it was set close to where I grew up. And while I am a little older than the characters in the novel, my own era has some overlap, and I was able to get a good amount of identification through these pages.

This book is basically set in my own stomping grounds. There was a thriving music scene on Long Island in the ‘90s and 2000s that was unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been. I think a big part of that is the proximity to NYC and the boroughs and the music scene there, and I have so many fond memories of attending shows both on the island and in the city. But the setting is captured perfectly, and it felt like the best kind of nostalgia as I read about it. The gritty underground vibe of the indie music scene really felt immersive, while the pop culture references brought me right back to the 2000s along with Susan. I listened to the audiobook of this one, narrated by Bailey Carr, and she did an outstanding job of bringing this story and Susan to life. She helped to hold my attention during the slower parts or ones that I didn’t love as much (read: where her and Eliza are together).

This is very much a queer coming-of-age story, but I wasn’t surprised to see that identifying as queer still wasn’t socially acceptable and it was a topic that wasn’t freely spoken about. As a young woman questioning her sexuality in the 2000s, I could identify easily with Susan—it slowly becomes more clear that she was missing so many signs about her sexuality and a big part of that was the way there weren’t really any openly queer people in most standard situations. One of my favorite aspects about Susan was that she was a messy, flawed individual who makes some good choices and some terrible ones, but in the end, she had grown so incredibly much that she really demonstrated the coming-of-age theme perfectly.

However, the side characters felt flatter to me. While Susan was so well-rounded and realistic that she practically leapt off the page, the other characters don’t have that same vibrancy. I did enjoy seeing how the friendship between Susan and her best friend Katie changed as they grew from teenagers to adults; it also felt realistic and mirrors the way a friendship dynamic changes from high school to adulthood, sometimes adapting to the diverging paths between friends, sometimes growing apart. It does great justice to the friendship dynamics that develop on Long Island and the way teen societies here are striated into social groups that often reflect on how they view themselves.

At the center of the novel is the impact our first love can have on us. Susan places her first love on a pedestal, and kept pining for Eliza, the one that got away. Over the years, their paths cross a few times, but I didn’t really feel the chemistry between these two was realistic, so I couldn’t understand why Susan continued to pine for Eliza even years later. This central storyline didn’t hold my attention as strongly as I had hoped, since so much of it was focused on the back and forth between Susan and Eliza, although I did like the growth that Susan experiences.

Overall, I found this book to be a pretty intriguing one, and I really loved the coming-of-age aspect of the story, Susan made a compelling protagonist, and it wasn’t hard to empathize with her, although I struggled to understand her bond with Eliza. The pacing was good, I loved the way the setting was captured, and it really felt like my stomping grounds were depicted so accurately. While Susan’s character was vivid and realistic, it felt like the side characters weren’t as developed, so even major characters like Katie and Eliza were more one-dimensional. The best part of this book for me was the way Susan learns and changes as she experiences ups and downs, but a close second was the different types of friendships that Susan has—the high school best friend for life, the magical glow of first love, a queer mentor in the singer of her favorite band, and her interactions with coworkers. But in the end, I do think this perfectly captured the spirit of a nostalgic era of Long Island girls.

Bottom line: A trip down memory lane into the indie music scene and queer self-discovery, this is a fantastic coming-of-age story for one queer girl.

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