Today on the site I’m thrilled to welcome two debut YA authors, Emery Lee of Meet Cute Diary and Jonny Garza Villa of Fifteen Hundred Miles From the Sun! They’re here to talk about their delightful and romantic books, crafting as racially marginalized authors, and more, so pull up a seat and join us!
JONNY: A huge hello to arch-nemesis, agent sibling, and fellow fire sign sun and 2021 debut author, Emery! Thank you so much for letting me force you to do this! I feel like our friendship sort of began basically right after we first announced we were being published, which was also during the first couple of months of the pandemic and trying to adjust to what the world is now and what that might mean for us, so this seems super fitting to be celebrating our books now together.
Meet Cute Diary might just be my favorite book I’ve read so far this year. It is talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show-stopping, spectacular, never the same. And, in all seriousness, I love the trope-iness, the chaos, the humor, and the stress that all, for better or worse, defines Noah’s summer. For anyone who hasn’t read it yet, can you tell us about it?
EMERY: Haha thank you for such a fitting introduction and for all the book praise! I’d say your book is one of my favorites I read this year, but I just remembered I actually read it last year, so we’ll just say it’s one of the best books releasing this year! As for Meet Cute Diary, it’s the story of Noah, a trans teen, who curates a blog of trans meet cutes to give trans teens the hope for a happily ever after. The only problem is that all the stories are fake, so when a troll exposes the blog as fiction, Noah has to stage the ultimate fake relationship with a fan in order to keep the Diary afloat.
It’s always fun discussing our books together since they have a lot in common from the social media element to the pure chaotic messiness of the main character. The world is probably fortunate that Noah and Jules live in alternate universes and can’t actually become friends! But you can tell us more about Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun?
JONNY: Truly disaster children who need their phones and laptops taken away! I like to say that Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun is part my own adolescent traumas, part Selena’s “Dreaming Of You”, and a whole bottle of Patrón. It follows Julián (aka Jules) Luna, a high school senior from Corpus Christi, Texas just trying to have a low-key year with his friends, get into UCLA, and finally be able to move far away from home and all the environments that’ve kept him closeted for seventeen years. That all implodes on itself though when he accidentally comes out as gay on Twitter after getting way to drunk at a party. And in the days and weeks and months that follow Jules will discover all the good things and love that can come from living openly (including a Los Angeles Twitter crush sliding into the DMs) as well as the pain and rejection that can be part of learning to embrace who we are.
Another thing our books have in common is romance, although Noah’s and Jules’ journeys toward finding love are incredibly different. I love how the romantic aspect of Meet Cute Diary is, like, what we know of the rom com meets the scientific method, if that at all makes sense. What was it like writing the romantic elements of your book, Noah as a character determined to find love, and shaping this story into something so wonderfully unique?
EMERY: It’s funny because writing Noah was all about balancing two very opposite things—being a hopeless romantic while also being a cynic. In a lot of ways, Noah doesn’t think he’ll ever find love because as a triracial gay trans guy, he’s just never seen a happily ever after play out for people like him, but at the same time, all he wants in life is a perfect romance and he’s so in love with love that it’s all he can really think about. All of that came together in making Noah this control freak who loves the idea of things just falling into perfection but doesn’t think that’ll happen, and so he crafts these twelve steps based on the movies with the hopes that if he knows exactly how true love works, he can steer his relationship in exactly the right directions. So this opened up the ability to both play around with so many fun tropes while also writing this kind of larger, meta-narrative where I could subvert the way romance typically plays out in fiction, and that just made for a really fun time. I basically got to write all the cute things I’d ever want to see while also turning them all into the most chaotic humor, and that was just a really cool experience.
Writing rom coms, I think it’s pretty easy to accidentally stray into the realm of “too corny”, so for me, subverting the typical rom com tropes really helped steer me away from that. In your case, the book is a coming-of-age novel so there’s a lot more to ground the story in realism, yet the romance you wrote is still so ridiculously cute that it’s pretty easy to forget all the darker elements of the story! How did you strike that balance between the real, heavy elements of Jules’s life with all the romantic joys, and how did you maintain the harmony between those two halves of the story?
JONNY: I wanted, from the very beginning, for the romance in the story, and even Mat as a character and love interest for Jules, to be this one-eighty from his home life. And I wanted Mat to even be someone who also helps move that coming-of-age trope about the story forward just as much as he propels the romance part of the story. While Jules has always wanted to go to college in Los Angeles, now there’s another motive for really putting all his energy into that goal, especially as they get closer while, at the same time, Jules’s home life gets more destructive. And Mat is great at meeting Jules where he’s at in his coming out process and figuring out where he fits in the world now and really encourages Jules’s growth as an out gay young person. I also, and most importantly, wanted to make Mat feel real. Like, while he’s shameless and flirtatious he’s also empathetic and having that complexity there meant being able to be way too cute while also incorporating moments of serious intimacy and even, at times, frustration. I wanted to make their mutual attraction feel real. Especially with long-distance, I think it’s reasonable to ask “why this person who lives so far away?” and I wanted to make sure that both of them felt and read very much like, “out of anyone else in the world, it’s you.”
I think one of my favorite elements of your book, aside from the romance, is its use of social media and the meet cute blog posts from a lumberjack guy to a bakery encounter and commentary we get to see from Noah’s followers (and shit-talkers) throughout the book. Was there any specific inspiration for the blog posts? And I’d love to hear about how you were able to make all of these social media snippets so unique in their own purpose across the book but never really breaking the flow of story, which I think is truly a feat.
EMERY: Thank you! I feel like the blog posts were really just about showing the different sides of Noah’s situation. There’s what’s actually going on throughout the book, and then there’s the way people perceive what’s happening shown through comments and hate posts and stuff. I really pulled the inspiration just from real world social media, the way a conversation will morph and people will twist what originally happened or misinterpret everything because they’re only following along through subtweets or vague posts. So it was really just thinking about ways that a post today can turn into so many different conversations and thoughts down the road and how to apply that structure to the Diary to kind of keep track of how Noah’s fans and haters were feeling as the story unfolded. And, of course, keeping in mind that the internet is composed of so many different people from so many different backgrounds that a post that makes one person swoon can very easily make another person out for blood, and so I really wanted to showcase the scope of how an internet community can be when something like this unfolds.
Speaking of different backgrounds, something we both do in our stories is feature characters from/in different locations. For Meet Cute Diary, I have Noah who moves from Florida to Denver then out to California, and for Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun, you have Jules in Corpus and Mat out in LA. Obviously, you’re well-versed in that Texas lifestyle, but how did you go about crafting Mat’s California and drawing both the similarities and differences between two characters from two very different cities?
JONNY: I think what made it not so daunting is that, although it’s safe to say that Mat—as someone who is very proud to be from and loves California and specifically Los Angeles—would see LA very different from Jules, he tries to create a vision that fits Jules’s idealistic perception of a city he’s never actually been to. So, in that, I was able to bring in a lot of the things that made me fall in love with LA every time I’ve been there and celebrate those: the food, the beaches (which, and I can only speak for the few I’ve been to in/around LA, are much nicer than Corpus’s), the view from Griffith Observatory. I think, in a purely still mainly hypothetical future where we see more of Jules and Mat’s journey, it would be interesting to see how Jules’s idea of LA starts becoming more realistic but also probably still very much in love with the city, just like Mat. And I think, in crafting the ways their environments create two very different people and life experiences, I looked to their cultural backgrounds just as much as their locations, and how being a first-generation Vietnamese American and a first-generation Mexican American shape who these boys are, but also how growing up in a huge city in Southern California versus growing up in a not as huge city in South Texas can equally play a part in who they are. I wanted both nature and nurture present in their identities, I suppose.
Thinking about Jules and Mat and then especially characters like Noah and even Devin, I think it’s safe to say that, in many ways, our stories are presented through the eyes and experiences of main characters we don’t see very often in YA literature. You mind speaking on the significance, whether personally or from reader reactions, of telling a story and centering a character who is not by any means the “usual” kind main character we see in books?
EMERY: It’s funny because I think marginalized authors get asked to weigh in on “not the usual” main characters all the time, but there’s also a huge span in what that means. Like a white gay character isn’t “the usual” when most books feature straight characters, but the difference between that and a triracial gay trans boy is still massive. There are no other books with a main character like Noah. Someone linked me to a website that allows you to search a catalogue of all books available through any library in the country, and just finding a book about a triracial character was all but impossible. Now you look at a book where the character is also trans, which is exceedingly rare, and then you look at the genre (romcom), which is so inaccessible to queer authors and it’s just a whole mess. The response from readers has been amazing, and I’ve had so many people tell me this book is the first time they saw anyone even remotely similar to themselves in a book, and that’s super cool, but the journey has been exhausting. How do you advocate for a book when you struggle to find comp titles? How do you find media support when outlets don’t know where to categorize you? Every day is a battle just to get people to acknowledge Noah’s race along with his gender, to get people to stop misgendering Devin in interviews, etc. and frankly, if I were asked to do it again, I don’t think I would. I don’t think I could ever willingly sign up to have to make this fight day in and day out. But I also know that this book is a doorstopper. It may be one of if not the only title authors can point to in the future when they try to sell their triracial YAs or their trans romcoms or their stories with Spivak pronouns, and that’s what has me still pushing this book despite how endlessly burned out and beaten down I’ve been through this process. I know that there are authors who may only be able to get their foot in the door because this book held it open, and there are readers who may first see their worth in this book, and that’s huge.
I know you understand that QPOC struggle and how big of a deal it is to write these types of characters. How has the experience been for you, and how would you classify the significance of the story you’ve told both for readers but also in conversation with other queer/Chicanx stories?
JONNY: Yeah, I get that. The tolls emotionally and mentally, etc. that are forced to be expended when it comes to that loneliness from being the one singular person or story and being in a world and environment like publishing that can lack the knowledge or even empathy and, you know, at worst can be openly demeaning towards marginalized and especially QTBIPOC creators. I think there’s often that thought about “we’re breaking barriers or glass ceilings or doors” which is great and there’s a certain pride about it that shouldn’t be overlooked, but what is often forgotten about are the bruises and cuts that come from that. I’ve talked to a few people about this, but, even in my own experience with my book, Jules might be the first gay, Mexican American main character on the cover of a contemporary YA novel. And that’s wild to me. And, as I’ve said before, the, maybe, sole book on the gay Mexican American experience in YA (at least, in traditional publishing) is a book that takes place in the 80s. It shows the obvious lack of representation of queer Chicanes in young adult literature and just how large of a hole there is for young people who look like me wanting characters that feel like home for them. And, like, I really don’t like using the word “important” for things like this because I think that allows for it to be misused especially by audiences that don’t actually understand what makes it so important, but I think it’s also hard to deny that it’s there. That these books are important. That feeling of wanting this to be meaningful for young queer Chicanes while also at the same time having this heaviness that comes from being the first or only. This thought that if I and this book don’t do well, what are the implications for others who come after me? All while figuring out how to not let the daunting, very loud imposter syndrome telling me “you’re not Mexican enough to write this book” dictate my choices and how I wrote Jules’s story. Ultimately though, I think we both wrote books that we should definitely be proud of and feel so much like a part of our hearts and those parts of ourselves we put on page, and regardless, like you said, so many readers are going to see themselves for first time in Noah’s and Jules’ stories and that thrills me.
And speaking specifically to the queer identities of our characters, I’d love to get your thoughts on the state of LGBTQ+ YA and what you see that looking like in the next few years.
EMERY: You’re so right about the word “important”. It really can be a double-edged sword, and I think there has to be room to talk about the roles these books play in the grander scheme of things without the way our books get reduced to “importance” all the time. But on a lighter note, I think LGBTQ+ YA fiction in general has come a long way! It’s really hard to say where it’ll be in the next few years just because it’s changed so much in the past few years that I can only imagine (and sincerely hope) that the changes will be well beyond anything I can dream of now. Like SIMON VS released in 2015. That was only six years ago, but that book feels like a relic in terms of queer YA because things have grown and expanded so much since then. If you’d told me a couple years ago that a trans YA book, namely a trans gay Latinx YA book, would hit the NYT bestselling list (Cemetery Boys) or that we’d be getting a Chinese polyamorous throuple from a Big 5 publisher (Iron Widow), I don’t think I would’ve believed it, so looking ahead, I have really high hopes for where we go next. Of course I’m hoping for more intersectionality, more books about casual queerness, more queerness in non-contemporary settings, and more casts with multiple queer characters, but hoenstly, all of these things are becoming more and more common as we speak, so I guess what I’m saying is I’d hate to limit what we could get in the next few years by my own imagination because it just wouldn’t be enough.
Where do you see LGBTQ+ YA going in the near future?
JONNY: That’s such a good point! Like, just in between 2020 and now we’ve had queer fantasies, ghost romances, contemporary sequels, stories in space, gay pirates, thrillers, and that’s just in YA, which is incredible. I think my own hopes are, like, especially when it comes to QTBIPOC authors, that we get to write not only our identities as queer people but as also Black, Indigenous, non-white Latine, Asian people. I’ve had people say that my book reads like it was written for Chicanes first and I can blame that inspiration directly on books like Darius the Great Is Not Okay. And I’d love to see more of that, which I think goes with your own thoughts on more intersectional stories. I’d love to see more queer YA stories about high school freshman and what that adjustment looks like for LGBTQ+ kids. I’d love to see more parents of queer kids in QTBIPOC stories. I’d love to see more non-cis main characters who are BIPOC in all the genres. And I’m manifesting all of those and more.
I won’t keep you much longer, but, as someone who has also experienced publishing your debut during a pandemic and all the unique stress that that’s brought, and especially as someone who’s already got eir book out in the world, any advice for someone who (at least, at the time of this conversation) is getting real close to pub day?
EMERY: Yes, that is so true! The way BIPOC experience queerness is so different than the white queer experience, so it really is important that we be allowed to center people of our race and culture and not get boxed in to rehashing white queer stories but with brown faces! And the best advice I can give you is TAKE A NAP! Like, I’m sure people who’ve debuted at any time will tell you that debuting is a lot of stress and a lot of work and a whole bunch of things will fly out of nowhere and slap you across the face when you least expect them, but I think especially in this panini, we’re dealing with this collective trauma, fatigue around virtual events, financial stressors, etc. and I think the most important thing you can do for yourself is just give yourself some time to relax. Take the good opportunities as they come, but don’t force yourself to take on everything. Six months from now, you’ll still have your book and it’ll still be capable of finding readers, so put yourself first!
How has your pandemic debut experience been thus far and any big plans around release?
JONNY: Oh good, glad to get validation on my current very firm schedule of taking naps in between important things! This whole, what, now fifteen months, maybe fourteen since we announced, has been nothing like I envisioned this experience would be. I mean, when I got the initial offer, it was late January, we were thinking of these grandiose debut and release things. But I’ve been incredibly lucky that even while in solitude and isolation and quarantine, I’ve got to meet so many writers through virtual things or because of my book who I now call friends. It’s different than I thought it’d be but also I’m proud of everything that I’ve done up to now and am really excited to finally throw this book at the world. It will be bittersweet to have this part ending but I will never have taken a louder sigh of relief. And that I get to do that, even if virtually, with some of my favs like PerpetualPages booktuber Adri, Aiden Thomas, Amparo Ortiz, Julian Winters, Crystal Maldonado, Laekan Zea Kemp, and Olivia Abtahi will be absolutely fantastic. Oh, and you and Sonora Reyes too!
Before we say bye, want to let everyone know what’s coming up next or anything else you can share with readers?
EMERY: Haha there are definitely a lot of things I can’t talk about! All I have announced so far is the All Signs Point to Yes Anthology which is out in 2022. I’ll have a short story called “The Cure for Heartbreak” in that one, so look out for that! And I have a bunch of other projects in the works that I can’t really share yet, but I’ll hopefully have some news soon.
What can we expect next from Jonny Garza Villa?
JONNY: And we all wait very impatiently for the news! I was recently able to announce my next contemporary YA novel, Ander and Santi Were Here, about a non-binary muralist who falls for the newest waiter at their family’s taqueria. It’s a college-age YA that I really just let myself go all out with the queerness and the Mexicanness, and I love it very much. Our agent, Claire Draper has said of the book that it “feels unabashedly you” and I’ve had multiple tell me they cried with this one even more than they did with Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun, so I’m so very ready for early 2023 and to get this book out into the world. Other than that, I’ve got a few things currently in progress both on my own and one in partnership with another author, so I’m hoping to be busy for a long while.
Thank you again, Emery, for joining me for some queer chisme and book talk! I didn’t get a chance to call Noah or Devin a loser today, but I’ll make sure to get that in during our next thing together!
EMERY: Haha thanks for inviting me! And we should make sure to add time for a duel next time too. Gotta give the people what they want!
Jonny Garza Villa is a product of the great state of Texas, born and raised along the Gulf Coast, and a decade-long resident of San Antonio. They are an author of contemporary young adult fiction that maintains a brand of being proudly Latinx, and the most queer, and embracing the power and beauty of the chaotic gay. Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun is their debut novel. For more information, visit www.jonnygarzavilla.com.
Emery Lee is a kidlit author, artist, and YouTuber hailing from a mixed-racial background. After graduating with a degree in creative writing, e’s gone on to author novels, short stories, and webcomics. When away from reading and writing, you’ll most likely find em engaged in art or snuggling cute dogs. Eir debut novel MEET CUTE DIARY is available now.
Fifteen-year-old Spencer Harris is a proud nerd, an awesome big brother, and a David Beckham in training. He’s also transgender. After transitioning at his old school leads to a year of isolation and bullying, Spencer gets a fresh start at Oakley, the most liberal private school in Ohio.
There’s something unusual about Pamela Isley–the girl who hides behind her bright red hair. The girl who won’t let anyone inside to see what’s lurking behind the curtains. The girl who goes to extreme lengths to care for a few plants. Pamela Isley doesn’t trust other people, especially men. They always want something from her. Something she’s not willing to give.
When two Niveus Private Academy students, Devon Richards and Chiamaka Adebayo, are selected to be part of the elite school’s senior class prefects, it looks like their year is off to an amazing start. After all, not only does it look great on college applications, but it officially puts each of them in the running for valedictorian, too.
Fifteen-year-old Morgan has a secret: She can’t wait to escape the perfect little island where she lives. She’s desperate to finish high school and escape her sad divorced mom, her volatile little brother, and worst of all, her great group of friends…who don’t understand Morgan at all. Because really, Morgan’s biggest secret is that she has a lot of secrets, including the one about wanting to kiss another girl.
There’s one thing Jay Collier knows for sure—he’s a statistical anomaly as the only out gay kid in his small rural Washington town. While all this friends can’t stop talking about their heterosexual hookups and relationships, Jay can only dream of his own firsts, compiling a romance to-do list of all the things he hopes to one day experience—his Gay Agenda.
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Two boys, alone in space.
Emily and her mom were always lucky. Every month they’d take her lucky quarter, select lucky card 505, and dominate the heatedly competitive bingo night in their small, quirky town of Huckabee. But Emily’s mom’s luck ran out three years ago when she succumbed to cancer, and nothing has felt right for Emily since.
From the moment that Annie was born, she and her older brother, Jamie, were inseparable. Alike in almost every way, they promised to always take care of each other while facing the challenges of growing up different in suburban America. And when life became too much for them, they created their own space in the woods behind their house: a fantasy world of their own making, where no one else could find them. And it was enough, for a while. But then came middle school when Jamie grew dark and distant. He found new friends, a girlfriend, and a life away from Annie and their shared world. By the time Annie was in eighth grade, it was as if she hardly knew the brother who was her other half.
Girl meets boy. Girl likes boy.Girl gets friend to help win boy. Friend ends up with crush on boy…
Freddie has a reputation as a ‘nice guy’ – inoffensive, sweet, kind – and therefore completely un-dateable.
Cynical twenty-three-year old August doesn’t believe in much. She doesn’t believe in psychics, or easily forged friendships, or finding the kind of love they make movies about. And she certainly doesn’t believe her ragtag band of new roommates, her night shifts at a 24-hour pancake diner, or her daily subway commute full of electrical outages are going to change that.
Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer, Asian, adopted, and treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.
If she’s being honest, Sammie Lucas is scared of her son. Working from home in the close quarters of their Florida house, she lives with one wary eye peeled on Samson, a sullen, unknowable boy who resists her every attempt to bond with him. Uncertain in her own feelings about motherhood, she tries her best—driving, cleaning, cooking, prodding him to finish projects for school—while growing increasingly resentful of Monika, her confident but absent wife. As Samson grows from feral toddler to surly teenager, Sammie’s life begins to deteriorate into a mess of unruly behavior, and her struggle to create a picture-perfect queer family unravels. When her son’s hostility finally spills over into physical aggression, Sammie must confront her role in the mess—and the possibility that it will never be clean again.
After a lifetime of failed relationships, non-binary history professor Sam Bell is committed to a new (non)romantic strategy: Thirst Only. It’s the actual drinking where things get too complicated, where Sam inevitably gets hurt.
Elle Jones is constantly immersed in her job and doesn’t have time for much else. Her work life is on point, but the rest? Not so much. She never takes time to take care of herself, and she’s terrified of not being good enough to be loved.
No job, no money, no love – and to make things worse, 27-year-old Charlie has no choice but to leave New York City and move in with his mom in his isolated and conservative hometown of Sunset Springs.
Today’s gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan’s fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl,” country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her adult identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in her words, gay as hell.
Ashley Herring Blake is an award-winning author and literary agent at Rees Literary Agency. She holds a Master’s degree in teaching and loves coffee, arranging her books by color, and cold weather. She is the author of the young adult novels Suffer Love, How to Make a Wish, and Girl Made of Stars (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and the middle grade novels Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World, The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James and Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea (Little, Brown BFYR) . Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World was a Stonewall Honor Book, as well as a Kirkus, School Library Journal, NYPL, and NPR Best Book of 2018. Her YA novel Girl Made of Stars was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She’s also the author of the adult romance novel Delilah Green Doesn’t Care (Berkley), and a co-editor on the young adult romance anthology Fools in Love (Running Press Kids). You can find her on Twitter and Instagram at @ashleyhblake and on the web at 
Eliot: Nicole! How amazing is this?! If only we could go back to 2014 and tell baby Nicole and Eliot that they’d one day be having this conversation, and doing gay space book events together (you can check us out together virtually on June 8th hosted by 
Nicole: You gave me feedback on an early draft of PLANET, too, back when it had an entire arson subplot (when in doubt, add fire?) There are no fires in the finished draft, but 
ELIOT SCHREFER is a New York Times-bestselling author, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. In naming him an Editor’s Choice, the New York Times has called his work “dazzling… big-hearted.” He is also the author of two novels for adults and four other novels for children and young adults. His books have been named to the NPR “best of the year” list, the ALA best fiction list for young adults, and the Chicago Public Library’s “Best of the Best.” His work has also been selected to the Amelia Bloomer List, recognizing best feminist books for young readers, and he has been a finalist for the Walden Award and won the Green Earth Book Award and Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. He lives in New York City, where he reviews books for USAToday.
Nicole Melleby, a born-and-bread Jersey girl, is an award winning children’s author. Her middle grade books have been Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selections, recipient of the Skipping Stones Honor Award, and a 2020 Kirkus Reviews best book of the year. Her debut novel, Hurricane Season, was a Lambda Literary finalist. She lives with her partner and their cat, whose need for attention oddly aligns with Nicole’s writing schedule.
Follow Ari through their neighborhood as they try to find their words in this sweet, accessible introduction to gender-inclusive pronouns that is perfect for readers of all ages. 
Hazel Bly used to live in the perfect house with the perfect family in sunny California. But when a kayaking trip goes horribly wrong, Mum is suddenly gone forever and Hazel is left with crippling anxiety and a jagged scar on her face. After Mum’s death, Hazel, her other mother, Mama, and her little sister, Peach, needed a fresh start. So for the last two years, the Bly girls have lived all over the country, never settling anywhere for more than a few months.
For Pluto, summer has always started with a trip to the planetarium. It’s the launch to her favorite season, which also includes visits to the boardwalk arcade, working in her mom’s pizzeria, and her best friend Meredith’s birthday party. But this summer, none of that feels possible.
Aideen has plenty of problems she can’t fix. Her best (and only) friend is pulling away. Her mother’s drinking problem is a constant concern. She’s even running out of outlandish diseases to fake so she can skip PE.
When Humaira “Hani” Khan comes out to her friends as bisexual, they immediately doubt her. Apparently, she can’t be bi if she’s only dated guys. Cornered into proving her sexuality, she tells them she’s dating someone—Ishita “Ishu” Dey, the straight A student who seems more concerned with studying than relationships.
Set on a family-run interstellar freighter called the Harland and a mysterious remote space station, E. K. Johnston’s latest is story of survival and self-determination.
Waylon Russell Brewer is a fat, openly gay boy stuck in the small West Texas town of Clover City. His plan is to bide his time until he can graduate, move to Austin with his twin sister, Clementine, and finally go Full Waylon, so that he can live his Julie-the-hills-are-alive-with-the-sound-of-music-Andrews truth.
In the quiet streets of Prague all manner of otherworldly creatures lurk in the shadows. Unbeknownst to its citizens, their only hope against the tide of predators are the dauntless lamplighters – a secret elite of monster hunters whose light staves off the darkness each night. Domek Myska leads a life teeming with fraught encounters with the worst kind of evil: pijavica, bloodthirsty and soulless vampiric creatures. Despite this, Domek find solace in his moments spent in the company of his friend, the clever and beautiful Lady Ora Fischer – a widow with secrets of her own.
After having his heart trampled on by his cheating ex, Carter Ogden is afraid love just isn’t in the cards for him. He still holds out hope in a tiny corner of his heart, but even in his wildest dreams he never thought he’d meet the Crown Prince of England, much less do a lot more with him. Yes, growing up he’d fantasized about the handsome, openly gay Prince Edgar, but who hadn’t? When they meet by chance at an event Carter’s boss is organizing, Carter’s sure he imagined all that sizzling chemistry. Or was it mutual?
Brendon Lowell loves love. It’s why he created a dating app to help people find their one true pairing and why he’s convinced “the one” is out there, even if he hasn’t met her yet. Or… has he? When his sister’s best friend turns up in Seattle unexpectedly, Brendon jumps at the chance to hang out with her. He’s crushed on Annie since they were kids, and the stars have finally aligned, putting them in the same city at the same time.
After Tav’s dangerous journey to the magical City of Eyes, they realize they’re more than just a purple-haired, motorcycle-riding teenager who can see magic — they know how to use it.
Eighteen-year-old aspiring comic Joey Rossi just found out his boyfriend has been cheating on him for the past ten months. But what did he expect? Joey was born with an addiction to toxic jerks—something he inherited from his lovably messy, wisecracking, Italian-American spitfire of a mom (and best friend): 34-year-old Gia Rossi.
Danny Ip walks into every boardroom with a plan. His plan for struggling tech company WesTec is to acquire it, shut it down, and squeeze the last remaining revenue out of it for his Jade Harbour Capital portfolio. But he didn’t expect his best friend’s younger brother—the hottest one-night stand he ever had—to be there.
Maximus Wodlin hated magic. Long before it erupted from him, killing the son of Master Gathrax and altering the course of his life forever.
A butch lesbian parolee. The pretty pansexual nurse who got away. Is this their second chance at a happily ever after?
There hasn’t been a winner of the Miss Meteor beauty pageant who looks like Lita Perez or Chicky Quintanilla in all its history. But that’s not the only reason Lita wants to enter the contest, or why her ex-best friend Chicky wants to help her. The road to becoming Miss Meteor isn’t about being perfect; it’s about sharing who you are with the world—and loving the parts of yourself no one else understands. So to pull off the unlikeliest underdog story in pageant history, Lita and Chicky are going to have to forget the past and imagine a future where girls like them are more than enough—they are everything.
Choose your player.
When two teens discover that they were both sexually assaulted at the same party, they develop a cautious friendship through her family’s possibly-magical pastelería, his secret forest of otherworldly trees, and the swallows returning to their hometown, in Anna-Marie McLemore’s The Mirror Season…
In Thanopolis, those gifted with magic are assigned undead spirits to guard them―and control them. Ever since Rovan’s father died trying to keep her from this fate, she’s hidden her magic. But when she accidentally reveals her powers, she’s bound to a spirit and thrust into a world of palace intrigue and deception.
Eva, Celeste, Gina, and Steph used to think their friendship was unbreakable. After all, they’ve been though a lot together, including the astronomical rise of Moonlight Overthrow, the world-famous queer pop band they formed in middle school, never expecting to headline anything bigger than the county fair.
Vaseline on the teeth makes a smile shine. It’s a cheap stunt, but Mark Adams knows it’s optics that can win or ruin an election.
Lara’s had eyes for exactly one person throughout her three years of high school: Chase Harding. He’s tall, strong, sweet, a football star, and frankly, stupid hot. Oh, and he’s talking to her now. On purpose and everything. Maybe…flirting, even? No, wait, he’s definitely flirting, which is pretty much the sum of everything Lara’s wanted out of life.
Naomi Grant has built her life around going against the grain. After the sex-positive start-up she cofounded becomes an international sensation, she wants to extend her educational platform to live lecturing. Unfortunately, despite her long list of qualifications, higher ed won’t hire her.
Congregation Beth Abraham expected their newest rabbi to “sing some songs and go to an environmental rally.” But Vivian Green has other ideas. She wants her flock to engage meaningfully with their city-special mayoral elections, interfaith breakfasts, fights for affordable housing and all. Also, she would like just one night off to go dancing in the leather boots that make her look like her finest gay self.
In the former United States, sixteen-year-old Noam Álvaro wakes up in a hospital bed, the sole survivor of the viral magic that killed his family and made him a technopath. His ability to control technology attracts the attention of the minister of defense and thrusts him into the magical elite of the nation of Carolinia.
Dev has been with xyr service submissive Noam for seven years and xe loves them very much. Dev and Noam have built a good life together in Noam’s family home in Oakland, where they both can practice their magecraft, celebrate the high holidays in comfort, support each other as their disabilities flare, and where Noam can spend Shabbos with their beloved family ghost.
In a nuclear arms race, you’d use anything for an edge. Even magic.
In Sarahland, Sam Cohen brilliantly and often hilariously explores the ways in which traditional stories have failed us, both demanding and thrillingly providing for its cast of Sarahs new origin stories, new ways to love the planet and those inhabiting it, and new possibilities for life itself. In one story, a Jewish college Sarah passively consents to a form-life in pursuit of an MRS degree and is swept into a culture of normalized sexual violence. Another reveals a version of Sarah finding pleasure—and a new set of problems—by playing dead for a wealthy necrophiliac. A Buffy-loving Sarah uses fan fiction to work through romantic obsession. As the collection progresses, Cohen explodes this search for self, insisting that we have more to resist and repair than our own personal narratives. Readers witness as the ever-evolving “Sarah” gets recast: as a bible-era trans woman, an aging lesbian literally growing roots, a being who transcends the earth as we know it. While Cohen presents a world that will clearly someday end, “Sarah” will continue.
Seventeen-year-old Amalia Yaabez and Ezra Holtz couldn’t be more different. They’ve known (and avoided) each other their whole lives; she unable to stand his buttoned-up, arrogant, perfect disposition, and he unwilling to deal with her slacker, rule-breaking way of moving through the world.
Hollywood powerhouse Jo is photographed making her assistant Emma laugh on the red carpet, and just like that, the tabloids declare them a couple. The so-called scandal couldn’t come at a worse time—threatening Emma’s promotion and Jo’s new movie.
Queen Shulamit never expected to inherit the throne of the tropical land of Perach so young. At twenty, grief-stricken and fatherless, she’s also coping with being the only lesbian she knows after her sweetheart ran off for an unknown reason. Not to mention, she’s the victim of severe digestive problems that everybody thinks she’s faking. When she meets Rivka, an athletic and assertive warrior from the north who wears a mask and pretends to be a man, she finds the source of strength she needs so desperately.
Matt hasn’t eaten in days.
Intimacy has always eluded twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Krause—despite being brought up by married parents, models of domestic bliss—until, that is, Lucia came into her life. But when Maggie’s mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris’s will, five sealed envelopes, each addressed to a mysterious man she’s never heard of.
Arthur is only in New York for the summer, but if Broadway has taught him anything, it’s that the universe can deliver a showstopping romance when you least expect it.
For fans of George and Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World, a heartfelt coming of age story about a nonbinary character navigating a binary world.
Senior Ariel Stone is the perfect college applicant: first chair violin, dedicated community volunteer, and expected valedictorian. He works hard – really hard – to make his life look effortless. A failed Calculus quiz is not part of that plan. Not when he’s number one. Not when his peers can smell weakness like a freshman’s body spray.
I can’t believe there’s going to be a gay Jewish president.
Abby Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a dynastic rabbinical family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews.
Goldengrove’s towers and twisted chimneys rose at the very edge of the peaceful Weald, a stone’s throw from the poisonous marshes and merciless waters of Rye Bay. Young Tabby Palethorp had been running wild there, ever since her mother grew too ill to leave her room.
A deeply polarized and ungovernable United States of America has separated into two nations―the God Fearing States (GFS) and the United Progressive Regions (UPR).
When an unprecedented hurricane devastates the city of Houston, Noah Mishner finds shelter in the Dallas Mavericks’ basketball arena. Though he finds community among other queer refugees, Noah fears his trans and Jewish identities put him at risk with certain “capital-T” Texans. His fears take form when he starts seeing visions of his great- grandfather Abe, who fled Nazi Germany as a boy. As the climate crisis intensifies and conditions in the shelter deteriorate, Abe’s ghost grows more powerful. Ultimately, Noah must decide whether he can trust his ancestor — and whether he’s willing to sacrifice his identity and community in order to survive.
Would-be amusement park aficionado Dalia only has two items on her summer bucket list: (1) finally ride a roller coaster and (2) figure out how to make a new best friend. But when her dad suddenly announces that he’s engaged, Dalia’s schemes come to a screeching halt. With Dalia’s future stepsister Alexa heading back to college soon, the grown-ups want the girls to spend the last weeks of summer bonding–meaning Alexa has to cancel the amusement park road trip she’s been planning for months. Luckily Dalia comes up with a new plan: If she joins Alexa on her trip and brings Rani, the new girl from her swim team, along maybe she can have the perfect summer after all. But what starts out as a week of funnel cakes and Lazy River rides goes off the rails when Dalia discovers that Alexa’s girlfriend is joining the trip. And keeping Alexa’s secret makes Dalia realize one of her own: She might have more-than-friend feelings for Rani.
Lilah Silver’s a young actress who dreams of climbing out of B-list stardom. She’s been cast as the “final girl” in what could be her breakout performance…but if she wants to prove herself to everyone who ever doubted her, she’s going to need major help along the way.
Chicago, 1893. For Alter Rosen, this is the land of opportunity, and he dreams of the day he’ll have enough money to bring his mother and sisters to America, freeing them from the oppression they face in his native Romania.
Jonah Keller moved to New York City with dreams of becoming a successful playwright, but, for the time being, lives in a rundown sublet in Bushwick, working extra hours at a restaurant only to barely make rent. When he stumbles upon a photo of Richard Shriver—the glamorous Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and quite possibly the stepping stone to the fame he craves—Jonah orchestrates their meeting. The two begin a hungry, passionate affair.