GAMES WE PLAYED

When actress Rachel Goldberg shares her personal views on a local radio show, she becomes a target for online harassment. Things go too far when someone paints a swastika on her front door, not only terrifying her but also dredging up some painful childhood memories. Rachel escapes to her hometown of Carlsbad. To avoid upsetting her parents, she tells them she’s there to visit her Orthodox Jewish grandmother, even though that’s the last thing she wants to do. But trouble may have followed her.

Stephen Drescher is home from Iraq, but his dishonorable discharge contaminates his transition back to civilian life. His old skinhead friends, the ones who urged him to enlist so he could learn to make better bombs, have disappeared, and he can’t even afford to adopt a dog. Thinking to reconnect with his childhood friend, he googles Rachel’s name and is stunned to see the comments on her Facebook page. He summons the courage to contact her.

Rachel and Stephen, who have vastly different feelings about the games they played and what might come of their reunion, must come to terms with their pasts before they can work toward their futures.

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Reviews

"...a book for our times."

"Games We Played is a novel for this moment and beyond."

"Shawne Steiger’s clear-eyed and unflinching Games We Played captures the way trauma can distort lives and cascade from generation to generation to beget more trauma—and, in our too-angry world, how it can collide with the pain of others in explosive ways. This is a book for our times."

David Ebenbach,

author of the novel "Miss Portland"

"Games We Played is a novel for this moment and beyond."

"Shawne Steiger situates us in a very contemporary world of cyberstalking and the neo-Nazi threat, then takes us back in time, into territory ever deeper and more complex. Her hurt and bewildered characters try to make sense of a troubling intimacy where individual, intergenerational, and historical trauma converge while, in my own bewilderment at our current society, I am grateful to Steiger for her risky exploration of the webs that connect us. She illuminates how the past evokes damage - silence, rage, arousal, and shame - but may also offer a too-often thwarted possibility of healing. Games We Played is a novel for this moment and beyond.

- Diane Lefer

author of the novel "Radiant Hunger" and the short story collection "Confessions of a Carnivore"