Today’s post is sponsored by B.E. Bang and Furever Enchanted, out on the 24th!
How to get rich quick: Adopt a dog that literally poops gold.
Following a series of burglaries in her peaceful Tempe, Arizona community, an anxious, socially isolated introvert decides to adopt a dog from a nearby shelter. Zuri always wanted a dog and now seems as good of time as any to make that dream a reality.
Things don’t go according to plan. Not long after adopting her new dog, Zuri discovers the dog magically poops gold coins. In theory, that sounds great. In reality, her dog is wasting away and days away from death.
With the help of a hot veterinarian and an opinionated shelter employee, it’s up to Zuri to figure out how to disenchant her chow chow Gigi before it’s too late.
Dive into a charming and cozy debut novel filled with magic, a hint of romance, and found family.
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The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t a Guy at All by Sumiko Arai, trans. by Ajani Oloye
Fashionable and upbeat high schooler Aya falls head over heels for an employee at a local CD shop. He’s got an air of mystery about him, always dressed well, and has impeccable taste in music. Little does she know—this supposedly male employee is actually her female classmate Mitsuki! Mitsuki generally keeps to herself, but since her seat is right next to Aya’s, she can’t help but be extremely aware of the other’s crush. Revealing the truth is out of the question—but perhaps getting closer to Aya wouldn’t be so bad…
The Hollow and the Haunted by Camilla Raines
Miles Warren hails from a long line of psychics. Resigned to a life in the family business, Miles is perfectly happy, thank you very much—except that he’s constantly consumed by anxiety, hides his sexuality from almost everyone, and always feels exhausted from long nights spent wrangling angry ghosts. Perfectly happy.
Miles’ comfortable routine is interrupted when he starts to see the reflection of a strange boy in his mirror. He discovers the boy is none other than Gabriel Hawthorne, whose family have a mysterious, decades-long feud with Miles’ own—and that the visions are a premonition of his death. Gabriel is everything Miles expects from a Hawthorne—rude, snobbish, and irritatingly good-looking—but Miles isn’t just going to stand by and let someone murder him. (Even if he understands the impulse).
The two form an uneasy alliance, trying to work out who might want to kill Gabriel and prevent his death from taking place. As they uncover secrets about their families’ feud and dark magic swirls around them, Miles is horrified to realize that he doesn’t hate Gabrielas much as he’s supposed to. He might even like him.
Too bad Gabriel is almost certainly going to die.
Metal From Heaven by August Clarke
He who controls ichorite controls the world.
A malleable metal more durable than steel, ichorite is a toxic natural resource fueling national growth, and ambitious industrialist Yann Chauncey helms production of this miraculous ore. Working his foundry is an underclass of destitute workers, struggling to get better wages and proper medical treatment for those exposed to ichorite’s debilitating effects since birth.
One of those luster-touched victims, the child worker Marney Honeycutt, is picketing with her family and best friend when a bloody tragedy unfolds. Chauncey’s strikebreakers open fire.
Only Marney survives.
A decade later, as Yann Chauncey searches for a suitable political marriage for his ward, Marney sees the perfect opportunity for revenge. With the help of radical bandits and their stolen wealth, she must masquerade as an aristocrat to win over the calculating Gossamer Chauncey and kill the man who slaughtered her family and friends. But she is not the only suitor after Lady Gossamer’s hand, leading her to play twisted elitist games of intrigue. And Marney’s luster-touched connection to the mysterious resource and its foundry might put her in grave danger – or save her from it.
How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? by Anna Montague
Most days, Magda is fine. She has her routines. She has her anxious therapy patients, who depend on her to cure their bad habits. She has her longtime colleagues, whose playful bickering she mediates. She’s mourning the recent loss of her best friend, Sara, but has brokered a tentative truce with Sara’s prickly widower as she helps him sort through the last of Sara’s possessions. She’s fine.
But in going through Sara’s old journal, Magda discovers her friend’s last directive: plans for a road trip they would take together in celebration of Magda’s upcoming seventieth birthday. So, with Sara’s urn in tow, Magda decides to hit the road, crossing the country and encountering a cast of memorable characters—including her sister, from whom she’s been keeping secrets. Along the way she stumbles upon a jazz funeral in New Orleans and a hilarious women’s retreat meant to “unleash one’s divine feminine energy” in Texas, and meets a woman who challenges her conceptions of herself—and the hidden truths about her friendship with Sara.
As the trip shakes up her careful routines, Magda finally faces longings she locked away years ago and confronts questions about her sexuality and identity she thought she had long put to rest. And as she soon learns, it’s never too late to start your next journey.
The Arizona Triangle by Sydney Graves
In the vein of the bestselling California noirs of Sue Grafton and Sara Gran, a whodunnit about loyalty, love, and the legacy of trauma featuring a hardboiled, queer private eye whose latest case takes her deep into her own complicated past.
On the cusp of forty, Justine Bailen, better known as Jo, works for an all-female detective agency based in Tucson, Arizona. While staking out a cheating spouse, she learns that her long-estranged best friend from childhood, Rose, is missing, and that Rose’s mother wants to hire Jo to find her. This case is all kinds of wrong for Jo, but she has no choice but to head back to her hometown, an hour north and a world away from Tucson.
Back in Delphi, she learns that her high school boyfriend, Tyler—who is probably part of the reason her friendship with Rose went south—is the cop assigned to the case. It doesn’t take long for Jo to realize that he’s all mixed up in it, too. To have any hope of learning the truth about Rose’s disappearance, Jo must finally face the demons she thought she’d escaped.
Because Fat Girl by Lauren Marie Fleming
Hollywood isn’t nice to women like Diana Smith, but that hasn’t stopped her from being unabashedly queer, plus-sized, and determined to make award-winning movies that showcase the diversity of her community. She was so close to her goal, appearing at festivals and gaining attention for her short films, when grief came and shattered Diana’s directorial dreams.
Forced to move to the suburbs with her sister and kids, the closest thing Diana gets to the movies these days is dressing the stars of them at her high-end department store job. Until one day, she gets a pity invite to a gala full of Hollywood’s most elite, where she unwittingly attracts the attention of a famous action star.
The unexpected pairing shocks their friends–and the tabloids–forcing Diana to choose between the status quo and the silver screen. For the first time in her life, doors open for Diana and the possibilities seem endless. The chance to create unforgettable films. To shake up the industry. To inspire everyone who’s ever felt like they didn’t belong.
But fame always comes with a cost…and to get her Hollywood ending, Diana’s going to have to go completely off-script.
Ripcord by Nate Lippens
A novel about escape and connection, class, sex, and queer intimacy in the American Midwest.
The oldest story: an insider pretends to be an outsider and receives praise for his empathy and imagination and intelligence. Maybe some asshole even says bravery. An outsider pretends to be an insider, is exposed as a fraud, a liar, and burned to the ground.
In Ripcord, Nate Lippens continues his meditations on escape and connection, class, sex, and intimacy. Stuck in Milwaukee, the narrator cobbles together a living by bartending and catering weddings, enmeshed in a semiaffair with a younger, married man. Cruising apps while tallying his youthful romantic failures, he fantasizes about disappearance but finds both solace and frustration in his friendships with Charlie, an aging punk who was prominent in the 1990s Chicago queercore scene, and Greer, a painter who never broke through but continues making work.
Sweet Home Alabarden Park by T.J. O’Shea
Fiona Turner wonders which challenge will be the death of her: the renovation of a massive, crumbling, centuries-old English castle to make it fit for the King and Queen of England, or turning an American into a proper English duchess.
As Princess Beryl’s lady-in-waiting, Fiona’s duties are usually limited to the tedium and tradition of royal functions, an obligation she loves. However, in preparation to host the king and queen’s anniversary party, Princess Beryl has tasked Fiona to put her several historical degrees to use and spearhead the renovation of a neglected, but beautiful estate called Alabarden Park. The castle’s latest young duchess, Alice Stewart, has agreed to the renovation and hosting the party, on the condition Fiona also help her manage the estate while she gets her bearings with a new peerage and sprawling inheritance. There is only one problem.
The new duchess is American. A reckless, cheerful, ebullient American.
Fiona’s introversion and devotion to tradition has met its match against Alice’s relentless effervescence and unorthodox ideas—but the constant friction creates an undeniable heat between them. When tragedy strikes unexpectedly, Fiona must choose between the royal duties close to her heart, or the duty she has to follow her heart.
Buy it: Amazon
Yellow Barks Spider by Harman Burns
In the threadbare prairie town where Kid grew up, life moves slowly. For a troubled ten-year-old, the vast landscape of open skies and barren winters is a place of elemental magic and buried secrets. As the summers pass by, Kid explores a world of weed-choked yards, murky lakes, and a traveling carnival. But when Kid finds himself increasingly haunted by strange spider-infested visions of his next door neighbor’s shed, he falls deeper and deeper into his haunted inner world, eventually turning to mind-altering substances to combat his growing torment. Confronted by this psychic pressure, the book itself begins to crumble, splintering into disparate narrative voices as the workings of Kid’s imagination become animate, tactile— and language self-destructs.
Emerging from this crucible, Kid surfaces into adulthood as she moves through love, sex, and self-discovery as a trans woman. But when she returns to her hometown following the death of a family member, she is forced to reckon with all the fears she once left behind.
Buy it: Amazon
My Mother’s Ridiculous Rules for Dating by Philip William Stover (24th)
It’s hard to prove Mom wrong when she’s found Mr. Right…
Dumped by his boyfriend and stuck in an unfulfilling job, jaded NYC ghostwriter Sam Carmichael can’t be more miserable. Until the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday when his mother, Gloria, arrives with a present from the past.
Years ago, exasperated by Gloria’s matchmaking, Sam promised his mother that if he wasn’t coupled up by thirty-five, he would do whatever she wanted to find a boyfriend. Sam was joking; his mother was not.
Gloria swoops in creating new dating profiles, re-doing his wardrobe, and setting him up with a parade of bizarre matches. When his mom zeros in on sexy and passionate artist, Finn Montgomery, Sam intends to prove her wrong and stop her interfering for good. But when it comes to finding love, does mother really know best?
Buy it: Amazon
The Snowball Effect by Haley Cass (25th)
For the first time, Regan Gallagher is facing the world without her best friend by her side – no, Sutton isn’t dead but she is in Rome, following her dreams. And Regan really is thrilled for her. Left to her own devices, she’s doing… fine.
Oh, except for the fact that her new roommate, Emma Bordeaux, has hated Regan since the literal day they’d met two years ago. Sure, most of their interactions end in disaster and Regan is the root cause, but they are all accidents! She’ll win Emma over though; she’s determined to make this living arrangement work come hell or high water.
Emma never planned on finding herself living with the most frustrating person she’d ever met, but for rent this low, she’s positive that she can put up with anything Regan throws her way.
What she isn’t sure she can handle is her mom returning to her life, wanting to bond with Emma. She definitely doesn’t know how to manage her mom believing that she and Regan are a couple. And she doesn’t want to deal with the fact that Regan seems far too into acting the part.
Perhaps the most daunting aspect of all is realizing that she might have been wrong about Regan all along…
Buy it: Amazon
Non-Fiction
My Pisces Heart: A Black Immigrant’s Search For Home Across Four Continents by Jennifer Neal
I’ve never seen home as a permanent concept; it is an image crafted from untempered glass that threatens to shatter with lack of care.
Jennifer Neal was born in the United States to a family that moved continuously for their own survival and well-being—from the Great Migration to the twenty-first century. As an adult, she has continued to travel the world as a Black queer woman, across two decades and four countries—from Japan to the US and then Australia to Germany, where she has settled for now.
Throughout her moves, Neal threads her personal story of immigration with local Black histories and racial politics to provide context for her own experiences. The result is both a crucial examination of how racism plays a foundational role in modern-day immigration systems and a tender tribute to immigrants and their stories.
An unwavering interrogation of colonialism and policy, love and loss, hypocrisy and resistance, My Pisces Heart demands meaningful conversation about not only the ways in which we live with our histories, but also how they live through us—urging an honest dialogue on why the West continues to grapple with its past and visualize its future.
