This article explores representations of rural lesbian lives in three young adult novels. The examined novels are Beauty of the broken by Tawni Waters (2014), Pretend you love me by Julie Anne Peters (2005), and Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before by Karelia Stetz-Waters (2014). The first of the novels by Waters proposes a very negative portrait of rural life for queer youth. Its message is that the sole positive queer life is one that is lived in the urban. In contrast, the texts by Peters and Stetz-Waters propose rural spaces as potentially both inclusive and exclusive for queer youth. These novels also display that urban spaces can be equally problematic for queer youth. While it is not discounted that Waters' description of rural life may be the experience of some queer youth, it is asserted that the novels by Peters and Stetz-Waters present a more nuanced and complicated notion of place and its relationship to non-normative sexual subjectivities.