A young trans woman in Florida tries to survive a world that keeps mistaking her body for public property.
Kursti Aviva is twenty-one, broke, funny because collapsing is expensive, and trying to survive Florida without becoming public property.
At SeaStar Sundries, she sells sunscreen, cigarettes, pregnancy tests, and cheap beach souvenirs to people who think her body is a question they have the right to ask. At home, old names still arrive in envelopes. At the clinic, the file has more authority than the person sitting on the exam table. At church meetings and family tables, cruelty learns to speak in holy voices.
When anonymous messages begin following her from the internet into real life, Kursti is forced to measure the distance between being disliked and being in danger.
But she is not alone. Romy Lash arrives with food, bad decisions, and the kind of loyalty that does not need perfect language to be real. Warren Clustt does not ask the questions men usually ask. And Ash, younger and frightened and watching closely, reminds Kursti that survival is never only personal.
Kursti Aviva is for readers who want a novel that laughs in the middle of the wreckage, then asks who built it: the family, the church, the politics, and every polite little system that learned to call cruelty "concern."