Cool Cat by Jazz Taylor
This is the third book in the Wish series
Nova doesn’t lie — she tells hopes for the future. That’s why she tells her mom she got an A on her math quiz, even though she got a B. It’s also why she doesn’t tell her mom about her secret Instagram that she’s almost old enough to have.
When a viral video of her cat pushes her into the popular crowd, and next to her crush, Lily, Nova tells even more “hopes for the future” to try to fit in.
The more lies she tells, the more everything spins out of control! Nova wants to come clean…but will it mean losing everything?
Scrimshaw by Ethan M. Aldridge
This is the second book in the Deephaven Mystery series
After a chaotic semester, Guinevere “Nev” Tallow is looking forward to a quiet winter break at Deephaven Academy. But when they discover a strange artifact—a scrimshaw—hidden away deep in the under-basement of the school, they can’t resist the urge to investigate further.
This scrimshaw seems to be the skull of the school’s founder, Malachi Haven. Each of the skull’s few remaining teeth is engraved with a tiny image that foretells disaster. Nev quickly becomes obsessed with this mystery—not even their best friend, Danny, can distract them. And after something begins striking down students, Nev and Danny wonder if the images etched into the ancient teeth are actually warnings.
Can Nev protect the school from the coming doom foreseen by the scrimshaw, or are they on a collision course with fate?
Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White
On the night Miles Abernathy—sixteen-year-old socialist and proud West Virginian—comes out as trans to his parents, he sneaks off to a party, carrying evidence that may finally turn the tide of the blood feud plaguing Twist Creek: Photos that prove the county’s Sheriff Davies was responsible for the so-called “accident” that injured his dad, killed others, and crushed their grassroots efforts to unseat him.
The feud began a hundred years ago when Miles’s great-great-grandfather, Saint Abernathy, incited a miners’ rebellion that ended with a public execution at the hands of law enforcement. Now, Miles becomes the feud’s latest victim as the sheriff’s son and his friends sniff out the evidence, follow him through the woods, and beat him nearly to death.
In the hospital, the ghost of a soot-covered man hovers over Miles’s bedside while Sheriff Davies threatens Miles into silence. But when Miles accidently kills one of the boys who hurt him, he learns of other folks in Twist Creek who want out from under the sheriff’s heel. To free their families from this cycle of cruelty, they’re willing to put everything on the line—is Miles?
Celestial Monsters by Aiden Thomas
This is the second book in the Sunbearer duology
Teo never thought he could be a Hero. Now, he doesn’t have a choice.
The sun is gone, the Obsidian gods have been released from their prison, and chaos and destruction are wreaking havoc on Reino del Sol. All because Teo refused to sacrifice a fellow semidiós during the Sunbearer Trials.
With the world plunged into perpetual night, Teo, his crush Aurelio, and his best friend Niya must journey to the dark wilderness of Los Restos, battling vicious monsters while dealing with guilt, trauma, and a (very distracting) burgeoning romance between Teo and Aurelio. Determined to rescue the captured semidioses and retrieve the Sol Stone, the trio races against the clock to return Sol and their protective light so order can be restored.
Now the future of the whole world is in their hands.
The Ghost of You by Michael Gray Bulla
Everything has felt wrong since Caleb’s brother died, so when he sees a black cat that seems off, he doesn’t think anything of it. But when he looks closer, the cat doesn’t appear to have a clear face. It looks like it’s been smudged out. And he keeps following Caleb around. Haunting him. So Caleb calls him Ghost.
Caleb is trying to return to his normal life, but he can’t stop feeling distant and numb. Even being assigned to work on a school project with Emmett, the lead singer for a punk rock band, just feels like another blip. But as Caleb’s feelings for Emmett grow, so does the distance he has put between himself and his best friend, Tanya. Can Caleb stop running from his grief in order to save his friendship and discover Ghost’s true purpose?
When Haru Was Here by Dustin Thao
After the death of his best friend, Eric Ly creates imaginary scenarios in his head to deal with his grief. Until one of them becomes real when a boy he met last summer in Japan finds his way back into his life. When he least expects it, Haru Tanaka walks into the coffee shop and sits down next to him. The only thing is, nobody else can see him.
In a magical turn of events, Eric suddenly has someone to connect with, making him feel less alone in the world. But as they spend more and more time together, he begins to question what is real. When he starts losing control of the very thing that is holding him together, Eric must finally confront his reality. Even if it means losing Haru forever.
Mismatched: a Modern Graphic Retelling of Emma by Anne Camlin (text) and Isadora Zeferino (illustration)
Evan Horowitz has it all: beauty, brains, and a not-so-secret flair for matchmaking! An Insta influencer with a talent for makeup and a taste for romance, he’s no stranger to playing cupid for those hopelessly clueless in finding love.
So when shy transfer student Natalia shuffles into school one day, Evan can’t help but get his hands messy! With so many matches to choose from, it’s not long before he sets a plan in motion for Natalia—much against the better judgement of his level-headed best friend, Davi.
But he takes things too far, creating a web of drama that spirals out of his control. Can Evan learn to put the people closest to him before his misguided ambition? Or will he lose them and his own chance at romance, too?
Adult
We Came to Welcome You by Vincent Tirado
Where beauty lies, secrets are held…ugly ones.
Sol Reyes has had a rough year. After a series of workplace incidents at her university lab culminates in a plagiarism accusation, Sol is put on probation. Dutiful visits to her homophobic father aren’t helping her mental health, and she finds her nightly glass of wine becoming more of an all-day—and all-bottle—event. Her wife, Alice Song, is far more optimistic. After all, the two finally managed to buy a house in the beautiful, gated community of Maneless Grove.
However, the neighbors are a little too friendly in Sol’s opinion. She has no interest in the pushy Homeowners Association, their bizarrely detailed contract, or their never-ending microaggressions. But Alice simply attributes their pursuit to the community motto: “Invest in a neighborly spirit”…which only serves to irritate Sol more.
Suddenly, a number of strange occurrences—doors and stairs disappearing, roots growing inside the house—cause Sol to wonder if her social paranoia isn’t built on something more sinister. Yet Sol’s fears are dismissed as Alice embraces their new home and becomes increasingly worried instead about Sol’s drinking and manic behavior. When Sol finds a journal in the property from a resident that went missing a few years ago, she realizes why they were able to buy the house so easily…
Through Sol’s razor-sharp tongue and macabre sense of humor, Tirado explores the very real pressures to assimilate with one’s surroundings to “survive,” while also asking the question: Is it survival when you’re no longer your true self? Because in Maneless Grove, either you become a good neighbor—or you die.
Where the Forest Meets the River by Shannon Bowring
It’s been five years since Bridget Theroux’s death shocked the small town of Dalton, Maine, leaving behind husband Nate and daughter Sophie, now a vibrant young child. Nate doesn’t always know how to answer her questions, but he is intent on raising her with joy—and shielding her from her grandmother, Annette, who remains dangerously locked away in her grief.
After his first year away at college, Greg Fortin is back in town for the summer to work at the family store. It’s expected he’ll take over the hardware business eventually, but finding the words to tell them no—and the truth about who he is—has become his own Everest. Rose’s abusive ex, Tommy finally disappeared a few years ago, though sometimes his presence in the eyes of her oldest son unnerves her. She and Nate are finding themselves drawn together by their children’s playdates, and into a delicate balance between friendship and the possibility of more.
And Trudy and Bev, always so sure of their love for each other, find themselves rocked when Trudy’s husband Richard suffers a heart attack, bringing into focus all the guilt she has felt about their empty marriage for years.
Fall For Him by Andie Burke
Dylan Gallagher’s hot neighbor loathed him from the second he moved in, and causing a flood, falling through the floor, and landing directly onto that same neighbor’s bed probably means that’s unlikely to change. The poorly timed “It’s Raining Men” joke didn’t help.
Meanwhile, ER nurse Derek Chang’s life is a literal when-rains-it-pours nightmare. A man he hates dropped into his life along with an astronomically expensive problem originating from Derek’s own apartment’s plumbing. Also, the local HOA tyrant has been sniffing around trying to fine him for his extended, illicit banned breed dog-sitting.
Since Dylan also wants to keep the catastrophe quiet, he offers to fix the damage himself. Dylan’s sure he’s not Derek’s type, so he focuses all his ADHD hyper fixation energy on getting the repair job done as quickly as possible―avoiding doing anything stupid like acting on his very inconvenient crush. Meanwhile Derek tries to ignore that the tattooed nerd sleeping on the couch is surprisingly witty, smart, and kind, despite the long-term grudge Derek’s been holding against him. But will squeezing all their emotional baggage plus a dog into a tiny one-bedroom apartment be a major disaster…or just prove they’re made for each other?
The View From the Top by Rachel Lacey
When a driven businesswoman from Boston collides with a free-spirited artist on a Vermont mountainside, they share a memorable—and steamy—night, but life soon pits them against each other over the fate of a family business.
Emily Janssen prefers to play it safe. At thirty-five, she’s still working at the inn her grandmothers own while dreaming of a day when she’s able to support herself fully with her art. And while her friends have all hiked to the summit of the mountain in their hometown of Crescent Falls, Vermont, something has always held Emily back.
Diana Devlin has already made it to the top. Well, almost. She’s this close to securing the promotion that will put her in line to take over as CEO of her family’s hotel chain when her father retires. Everything is going to plan until an unexpected run-in with an alluring artist on a mountainside throws Diana off course, resulting in one of the hottest nights either she or Emily have ever experienced.
Emily walks away from their rendezvous feeling inspired to channel some of Diana’s confidence and finally chase her dreams. For Diana, it’s a reminder that with the right woman, she is capable of wanting more than one night.
But their growing passion threatens to burn them both when they learn that the hotel Diana’s in town to buy is none other than Emily’s grandmothers’ beloved inn. It’s Emily’s home, and no big city outsider—not even Diana—is going to take it away from her.
Will the view from the top be worth the climb, or will they both have farther to fall?
Buy it: Amazon
Your Dazzling Death by Cass Donish
Queer writers Cass Donish and Kelly Caldwell were life partners, exploring their evolving gender identities together, writing poems side by side, and navigating Caldwell’s severe bipolar disorder until her death by suicide in 2020. In Your Dazzling Death, Donish insists that the intimacy of an ongoing conversation with a beloved mysteriously continues after loss; they elegize Caldwell and summon the courage to witness their own state of “obliteration,” widowed and isolated as a global pandemic is unfolding.
With searing honesty and profound perceptiveness, Donish finds a fierce new aesthetic for the disorientation of grief. “Let me paint this / entire country / the colors of your face,” they write, showing how wildly scale can shift in the midst of loss. Against the backdrop of “anti-trans bills / moving through state legislatures,” Donish affirms the beauty of their lover’s trans becoming, recalling when they “sounded out / your new potential names / until we found those syllables . . . which tasted, you said, like having / a future.” In the sequence “Kelly in Violet,” the centerpiece of this collection, the story of Caldwell’s death emerges in conversation with the work of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio, whose words allow Donish to access the shattering event, appearing here in ghostly traces.
Your Dazzling Death memorializes a brilliant woman, ritualizes the work of grief, and subverts linear time, asserting that any shape the future takes will be informed forever by a monumental love that is still alive, not only in the past, but in an envisioned space of timelessness where love and grief are inevitably intertwined.
Letters to Forget by Kelly Caldwell
With searing intelligence and great sensitivity, the poems of Kelly Caldwell—many addressed to Cass Donish, her partner in the years before her suicide at thirty-one, swim through a complex matrix of transformations: mental illness, divorce, gender transition, and self-discovery. But they wrestle, too, with the poet’s painful relationships with her family of Christian missionaries, who refused to affirm her identity. In a sequence of “dear c.” poems scattered throughout these pages, Caldwell writes letters to her lover from an out-of-state residential hospital where she is receiving treatment for suicidal depression and mania. In a long poem titled “Self-Portrait as Job,” she offers us her lucid gaze and her queer take on the biblical figure—an understated yet powerful testament to her own suffering in a society whose structures may not contain her.
Both striking and elusive, both raw and learned, with a delicacy of syntax that challenges us to interrogate becoming itself, Kelly Caldwell asks us from beyond: What kind of fragile agency is at the heart of obliterating change?
I’d probably have passed over that cover in a bookstore, but We Came to Welcome You sound fabulous – queer and spooky and strange.