If I Tell You

What if the secret is more damaging than the lie?

If I Tell You is about being seventeen and growing up in rural Australia; falling in love for the first time, following your dreams and disappointing your parents. It’s about figuring out who you are on your own terms and learning to wear your skin like it belongs to you – being brave enough to live your life.

Alicia Tuckerman is driven to empower and champion young LGBT voices with her debut 2018 YA Romance novel, If I Tell You. Her raw, honest and heart-wrenching prose explores important and boundary-pushing issues affecting young Australians, including love, acceptance, sexuality and identity, as well as overcoming societal prejudice. The story focuses on the repercussions of concealing truths, big or small, and how these hidden truths affect others.

If I Tell You is a YA Romance about a seventeen-year-old girl named Alex, who lives in an extremely conservative, rural farming town called Two Creeks. She lives with a secret and the constant fear that someone will find her out. Her relationship with her mother is already strained because Alex rides a motorbike and plays guitar instead of baking Victoria sponges in the kitchen like her mother.

When a new family moves to town, they bring with them their teenage daughter Phoenix who is openly gay and proud of it. When Alex falls in love with Phoenix, she is faced with an internal struggle between the desire for self-discovery and self-preservation, fearing the damage a relationship with Phoenix would do to her relationships with family and friends. When you keep a secret, are you protecting yourself or others from the truth?

But, Phoenix has a secret of her own – a hereditary condition called Juvenile Haemochromatosis – which ultimately results in heart failure. Although Alex loses her first love, it is because of Phoenix that she is finally able to overcome adversity and be who she was born to be.

The story ends with Alex and her friends leaving Two Creeks with the realisation that the town’s inhabitants are simply products of their environment who don’t always express their true beliefs.

This empowering debut from Perth-based Alicia Tuckerman is not just a story for the LGBT community, but also a beautiful and heartbreaking YA romance.