In Deeper Waters by F.T. Lukens (YA)
The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall (YA)
The Wicked Bargain by Gabe Cole Novoa (YA, audiobook narrated by Vico Ortiz)
A Pirate’s Life for Tea by Rebecca Thorne
Peter Darling by Austin Chant
Bonus: Coming in June and July 2024, respectively, check out Running Close to the Wind by Alexandra Rowland and Peregrine Seas by R.C. Ballad
Lacey Heller is sure that nothing interesting could possibly happen at Camp Lavender, because it never does. Her parents have been running this Christian camp for girls ever since she can remember. Little does Lacey know that Jo Delgado is coming to camp this summer—and she’s going to change everything.
After the incident, Jo’s aunt sends her to Camp Lavender instead of the science camp she desperately wants to attend. Her aunt hopes that Camp Lavender will put Jo on the “right path,” influenced by nice girls like Lacey. The best Jo can hope for is to run a successful experiment so that she doesn’t waste her whole summer.
Lacey is a good Christian girl…or at least she thought she was. But Jo changes all that. There’s something different about Jo—and that something could get Lacey into big trouble.
Lacey and Jo must help each other untangle who they are from who everyone says they’re supposed to be.
Buy it: Bold Strokes Books
Mae and Ari are not your average power couple.
Their love story started when they met at Leeds University. Back when Mae, whilst never short of a date and confident about who she is at her core, needed Ari’s bright light to help her grow into herself.
Ari, having run from New York following an undisclosed scandal and battling his own demons, held onto Mae as his grounding anchor.
Though they quickly become inseparable, their inimitable bond must survive guilt, secrets, growing up and, ultimately, love in all its complex and fluid forms.
Buy it: Blackwells
What would you do if no one could see you? In this surreal adventure, a boy who is used to being overlooked literally becomes invisible, only to realize there may be far more dangerous threats in his school than bullies.Sixth grade takes a turn for the weird when Hector Griggs discovers he has the ability to turn invisible. Sure, ever since Hector’s former best friend Blake started bullying him, he’s been feeling like he just wants to disappear…but he never thought he actually would. And then, Hector meets another invisible boy, Orson Wellington, who has an ominous warning: “I’m stuck here. Stuck like this. It’s been years. The gelim’s hunting me and it’ll get you, too.”It turns out, there is more than meets the eye at St. Lawrence’s Catholic School for Boys, and if Hector is going to save Orson–and himself—from the terrifying creature preying on students’ loneliness and fear, he’ll need to look deeper. With the help of a mysterious new classmate, Sam, can Hector unravel the mysteries haunting his school, and discover that sometimes it takes disappearing to really be seen?
Only an elite few are legally permitted to study the science of magic―so when Ash is rejected by Lancaster College of Alchemic Science, he takes a job as the school’s groundskeeper instead, forced to learn alchemy in secret.
When he’s discovered by the condescending and brilliant apprentice Ramsay Thorne, Ash is sure he’s about to be arrested―but instead of calling the reds, Ramsay surprises Ash by making him an offer: Ramsay will keep Ash’s secret if he helps her find the legendary Book of Source, a sacred text that gives its reader extraordinary power.
As Ash and Ramsay work together and their feelings for each other grow, Ash discovers their mission is more dangerous than he imagined, pitting them against influential and powerful alchemists―Ash’s estranged father included. Ash’s journey takes him through the cities and wilds across New Anglia, forcing him to discover his own definition of true power and how far he and other alchemists will go to seize it.
After running away from home, Sybil Clarion is eager to embrace all the freedom the Belle Époque city of Severon has to offer. Instead, she’s traded high-society soirées for empty pockets. At least she has Esme, the girl who offered Sybil a home, and if either of them dared, something more.
Ever since Esme Rimbaud brought Sybil back to her flat, the girls have been everything to each other—best friends, found family, and secret crushes. While Esme would rather spend the night tinkering with her clocks and snuggling her cats, Sybil craves excitement and needs money. She plans to get both by stealing the rare posters that crop up around town. With rent due, Esme agrees to accompany—and more importantly protect—Sybil.
When they’re caught selling a poster by none other than its subject, Maeve, the glamorous girl invites Sybil and Esme to The Absinthe Underground, the exclusive club she co-owns, and reveals herself to be a Green Faerie, trapped in this world. She wants to hire thieves for a daring heist in Fae that would set her free, and is willing to pay enough that Sybil and Esme never have to worry about rent again. It’s too good of an offer to pass up, even if Maeve’s tragic story doesn’t quite add up, and the secrets could jeopardize everything the girls have so carefully built.
Photographer and film buff Daniel Sanchez learned a long time ago that the only way to get by in an allistic world is to mask his autism and follow the script. Which means he knows that boisterous, buff, and beautiful soccer superstars like his best friend, Mona Sinclair, shouldn’t be wasting time hanging out with introverts who prefer being behind the camera.
So when Daniel meets a new classmate, Gabe Mendes, who is tall, mysterious, nonbinary, and—somehow—as cool as Mona, Daniel knows exactly how this is going to play out. Mona and Gabe will meet cute, win their nominations for Homecoming Court, and ride off into the sunset together. Daniel just needs to do a little behind-the-scenes directing.
But matchmaking means stepping into the mystifying and illogical world of love, dating, and relationships, where nothing is as it seems and no one knows their lines. And when Daniel finds himself playing a starring role in this romance, he’ll question everything he thought he knew about himself and his place in the world.
This is the third book in the Bone Spindle series
Not all curses should be broken. Not all fairytales end happily ever after.
Fi is a prisoner. Briar, a monster.
Shane’s a warrior. And Red is a traitor.
What was once a formidable group of four fighting to reawaken the kingdom is now ruptured, torn apart by the wicked Spindle Witch.
Confined to a tower with the monstrous Briar Rose, Fi is caught in the Spindle Witch’s ever-tightening web. With the Spindle Witch on the verge of finding the Siphoning Spells and crushing Andar—with Fi’s help, no less—Fi’s only hope lies in decoding the ancient riddle of the Rose Witches before she loses Briar forever.
Shane is desperate to save Andar—and her partner. She’s on the hunt for a weapon left by the mysterious Lord of the Butterflies, which holds the key to the Spindle Witch’s demise. Her love for Red has only fortified. But Red’s betrayal puts her in danger from a new enemy—the Spindle Witch’s executioner, the Wraith, a witch as powerful as he is cruel.
The future of Andar lies in the secrets of its past. Fi and Shane must take on the greatest lost ruin of them all—the Tomb of Queen Aurora.
It’s been one year since Hazeem’s father passed away unexpectedly, and one year since Hazeem got his special ability: He can grant any living thing extra time. Since then, he’s been randomly granting people more years to live: his old friend Holly, his study buddy Yamany, his crush Jack. . . . The only problem is, none of them wanted to spend any of that time with Hazeem.
Now, Hazeem spends most of his days with his grandmother. When she experiences a heart attack, Hazeem is quick to use his power to save her–until Time themself appears and tells Hazeem he has accrued a time debt, having given away more life than he has left to live and putting the entire timeline in serious danger of collapse. In order to save the timeline and himself, Hazeem must take back some of the life he has granted other people. Suddenly, Hazeem is on a journey through and against time, but as he confronts the events of the past, he must confront the mistakes he made along the way. Hazeem will come to realize that when it comes to time, quality is more important to quantity–but is it too late to reclaim the life he’s given away so he can really start living?
Stonebridge High’s resident bad boy, seventeen-year-old Wesley “Big Mac” Mackenzie, is failing senior year—thanks to his unchecked anger, rowdy friends, and a tendency to ditch his homework for skateboarding and a secret photography habit. So when his mom drags him to a production of The Nutcracker, Wes isn’t interested at all . . . until he sees Tristan Monroe. Mr. Nutcracker himself.
Wes knows he shouldn’t like Tristan; after all, he’s a ballet dancer, and Wes is as closeted as they come. But when they start spending time together, Wes can’t seem to get Tristan out of his head. Driven by a new sense of purpose, Wes begins to think that—despite every authority figure telling him otherwise—maybe he can change for the better and graduate on time.
As a falling out with his friends becomes inevitable, Wes realizes that being himself means taking a stand—if only he can blow up the bad-boy reputation he never wanted in the first place.
This is the third book in the Halfling Saga
“It seems fate has dealt me the same hand again. I know how to play it.”
A new king is on the throne and the rebellion lies in ruins. Keera spends her days drinking and her nights avoiding the strange dreams that have haunted her since she returned from the capital.
Keera’s family in Myrelinth won’t let her go without a fight. With new intelligence about the magical seals left behind by Keera’s ancient kin, the Light Fae, she rallies to face her demons and unleash the formidable powers she inherited from her people. But a shocking truth is hiding in plain sight, one with the power to unravel the entire rebellion…
The pivotal third installment in the Halfling Saga will upend everything Keera thought she knew about her enemies . . . and her allies.
It’s been a year since his ex-boyfriend dumped him and moved from Auckland to Buenos Aires, and Valdin is doing fine. He has a good flat with his sister Greta, a good career where his colleagues only occasionally remind him that he is the sole Maaori person in the office, and a good friend who he only sleeps with when he’s sad. But when work sends him to Argentina and he’s thrown back in his former lover’s orbit, Valdin is forced to confront the feelings he’s been trying to ignore—and the future he wants.
Greta is not letting her painfully unrequited crush (or her possibly pointless master’s thesis, or her pathetic academic salary…) get her down. She would love to focus on the charming fellow grad student she meets at a party and her friendships with a circle of similarly floundering twenty-somethings, but her chaotic family life won’t stop intruding: her mother is keeping secrets, her nephew is having a gay crisis, and her brother has suddenly flown to South America without a word.
Sharp, hilarious, and with an undeniable emotional momentum that builds to an exuberant conclusion, Greta & Valdin careens us through the siblings’ misadventures and the messy dramas of their sprawling, eccentric Maaori-Russian-Catalonian family. An acclaimed bestseller in New Zealand, Greta & Valdin is fresh, joyful, and alive with the possibility of love in its many mystifying forms.
Alistair McCabe comes to New York with a plan. Young, handsome, intelligent, and gay, he hopes to escape his Rust Belt poverty and give his mother a better life by pursuing a career in high finance. But by the spring of 2016, Alistair’s plan has come undone: His fantasy banking job has eluded him, he’s mired in student debt, and in his desperation he’s gone to work for an enigmatic billionaire whose ambitions turn out to be far darker than any Alistair could have imagined—and now Alistair is running for his life.
Meanwhile, Alistair’s paramours, an older couple named Mark and Elijah, must face their own moral and financial dilemmas. Mark, nearing the end of his trust fund, takes a job with his father’s mobile home empire that forces him to confront the unsavory foundations of his family’s wealth, while Elijah, a failed painter, throws in his lot with an artist-provocateur whose latest project transforms the country’s political chaos into a thing of alluring, amoral beauty. As the nation hurtles toward a breaking point, Alistair, Mark, and Elijah must band together to save one another and themselves.
On a Greek island rich with ancient beauty, a lonely woman in her thirties upends the relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter. Lust and admiration for Helena, a chic older artist, brings Antiquity’s unnamed narrator to Ermoupoli, where Helena’s daughter, Olga, seems at first like an obstacle and a nuisance. But the unpredictable forces of ego and desire take over, leading our narrator down a more dangerous path, and causing the roles of lover and beloved, child and adult, stranger and intimate to become distorted. As the months go by, the fragile web connecting the three women nears rupture, and the ominous consequences of their entanglement loom just beyond a summer that must end.
An AI child discovers Jewish mysticism. A student can give no more blood to their semi-sentient apartment and plans their escape. A candidate is rigorously evaluated for their ability to be a liaison to alien newcomers. A young magician gains perspective from her time as a plant. A neurodivergent woman tries to survive on a planetoid where thoughts shape reality…
These are stories about the depth and breadth of the human condition—and beyond—identifying future possibilities of conflict and cooperation, identity and community.
Buy it: Amazon | Broken Eye Books
England 1795
London gentleman Daniel Thornton has just dumped his philandering lover Clarence. He moves to Grantham to care for his ailing uncle and nurse a broken heart. The move he hopes will be a fresh start – a place to discover himself and perhaps a new way of seeing the world.
Luke Morley is a draper’s son struggling to accept his sexuality. He has withdrawn into a world of fantasy, but with the arrival of Mr. Thronton this private world is shattered. Grantham’s most eligible bachelor is everything Luke has ever dreamed of. After months of silent admiration, he determines to introduce himself.
Re-enter Clarence, who arrives to win back his old lover. When Daniel rejects him again, he is not about to take it lying down…
A blackmail note appears – a demand that Daniel marry one of Luke’s sisters. A demand that he fulfill Luke’s sexual desires.
Daniel saw young Mr. Morley leave the note on his mantle.
The note is from Luke.
Isn’t it?
Buy it: Amazon
Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee—and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet—he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole.
An exploration of artistic freedom, survival, and the hidden places of the imagination, including James Baldwin in Provence, Josephine Baker in Paris, Kevin Killian in San Francisco, and E. M. Forster in Cambridge, among other groundbreaking queer artists of the twentieth century.
Nothing Ever Just Disappears is radical new history of seven queer lives and the places that shaped these groundbreaking artists.
At the turn of the century, in the shade of Cambridge’s cloisters, a young E. M. Forster conceals his passion for other men, even as he daydreams about the sun-warmed bodies of ancient Greece. Under the dazzling lights of interwar Paris, Josephine Baker dances her way to fame and fortune and discovers sexual freedom backstage at the Folies Bergère.
And on Jersey Island, in the darkest days of Nazi occupation, the transgressive surrealist Claude Cahun mounts an extraordinary resistance to save the island she loves, scattering hundreds of dissident artworks along its streets and shorelines.
Nothing Ever Just Disappears brings to life the stories of seven remarkable figures and illuminates the connections between where they lived, who they loved, and the art they created. It shows that a queer sense of place is central to the history of the twentieth century and powerfully evokes how much is lost when queer spaces are forgotten.
From the suffragettes in London and James Baldwin’s home in Provence, to Kevin Killian’s San Francisco and Derek Jarman’s cottage in Kent, this is both a thrilling new literary history and a celebration of freedom, survival, and the hidden places of the imagination.
In their new book, Shayla Lawson reveals how traveling can itself be a political act, when it can be a dangerous world to be Black, femme, nonbinary, and disabled. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self.
Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year’s Eve in Mexico City, Lawson’s travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal.
Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location—and their deepest emotions—to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms.
A searing debut YA poetry and essay collection about a Black cancer patient who faces medical racism after being diagnosed with leukemia in their early twenties, for fans of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Shout.
When Walela is diagnosed at twenty-three with advanced stage blood cancer, they’re suddenly thrust into the unsympathetic world of tubes and pills, doctors who don’t use their correct pronouns, and hordes of “well-meaning” but patronizing people offering unsolicited advice as they navigate rocky personal relationships and share their story online.
But this experience also deepens their relationship to their ancestors, providing added support from another realm. Walela’s diagnosis becomes a catalyst for their self-realization. As they fill out forms in the insurance office in downtown Los Angeles or travel to therapy in wealthier neighborhoods, they begin to understand that cancer is where all forms of their oppression intersect: Disabled. Fat. Black. Queer. Nonbinary.
In Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir, the author details a galvanizing account of their survival despite the U.S. medical system, and of the struggle to face death unafraid.
Muffin maker Olivia Roberts has had it with her awful exes taking advantage of her good nature. The theft of her nana’s beloved stuffed penguin is the absolute last straw.
She puts up an ad at her local crime bookstore for a henchperson to help her enact a little mild revenge. To her astonishment, Margaret Blackwood, the mysterious, icy, and annoyingly opinionated bookstore owner, applies.
For two clever, capable women, they turn out to be woeful at vengeance. But much to their dismay, they discover they’re pretty good at falling in love!
Buy it: Ylva
She needs a woman’s kiss to break her curse.
When Deepa Patel rejects the wrong man, he curses her: every night, she will transform into a wild animal until her curse is broken by true love’s kiss. The problem is twofold. One: Deepa needs her nights to seduce shallow men into spending money on her—money she desperately needs to buy herself and her mother a better life. Two: she doesn’t believe in love. She’s never met a man she wanted to keep longer than a week, never mind forever.
She never considered her true love might be a woman.
Roz is unlike any of Deepa’s past suitors. She’s working class, with a nose that’s been broken at least once, courtesy of an underground boxing club. And she makes Deepa feel lighter and softer than she ever thought possible. But Roz can’t afford to give Deepa the life of luxury she craves.
Meanwhile, Deepa is posing as a wealthy nobleman’s fiancée. There’s no love between them, but his lifestyle is everything she’s ever wanted. Caught between a real relationship and a loveless fake one, Deepa has to choose: give up on her dreams for a chance at true love, or make her dreams come true but stay cursed forever.
Buy it: Amazon
Abby Akerman believes in the Universe. After all, her Midwest high school marching band is about to perform in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City—if that’s not proof that magical things can happen, what is? New York also happens to be the setting of her favorite romance novel, making it the perfect place for Abby to finally tell her best friend Kat that she’s in love with her (and, um, gay). She’s carefully annotated a copy of the book as a gift for Kat, and she’s counting on the Universe to provide an Epic Scene worthy of her own rom-com.
Leo Brewer, on the other hand, just wants to get through this trip without falling apart. He doesn’t believe the Universe is magical at all, mostly because he’s about to be outed to his very Southern extended family on national TV as the trans boy he really is. He’s not excited for the parade, and he’s even less excited for an entire day of sightseeing with his band.
But the Universe has other ideas. When fate throws Abby and Leo together on the wrong subway train, they soon find themselves lost in the middle of Manhattan. Even worse, Leo accidentally causes Abby to lose her Epic Gift for Kat. So to salvage the day, they come up with a new mission: find a souvenir from every location mentioned in the book for Abby to give Kat instead. But as Leo and Abby traverse the city, from the streets of Chinatown to the halls of Grand Central Station and the top of the Empire State Building, their initial expectations for the trip—and of each other—begin to shift. Maybe, if they let it, this could be the day that changes everything, for both of them.
From the bestselling, award-winning creator of Almost American Girl comes an epic new graphic novel fantasy—a queer, feminist reimagining of the Fox Maiden legend from Korean mythology.
Kai Song dreams of being a warrior. She wants to follow in the footsteps of her beloved father, the commander of the Royal Legion. But while her father believes in Kai and trains her in martial arts, their society isn’t ready for a girl warrior.
Still, Kai is determined. But she is plagued by rumors that she is the granddaughter of Gumiho, the infamous nine-tailed fox demon who was killed by her father years before.
Everything comes crashing down the day Kai learns the deadly secret about her mother’s past. Now she must come to terms with the truth about her identity and take her destiny into her own hands. As Kai desperately searches for a way to escape her fate, she comes to find compassion, and even love, in the most unexpected places.
Set in sixteenth-century Korea and richly infused with Korean folklore, The Fox Maidens is a timeless and powerful story about fighting for your place in the world, even when it seems impossible.
Deep in the forgotten hills of Massachusetts stands Saint Perpetua’s College. Isolated and ancient, it is not a place for timid girls. Here, secrets are currency, ambition is lifeblood, and strange ceremonies welcome students into the fold.
On her first day of class, Laura Sheridan is thrust into an intense academic rivalry with the beautiful and enigmatic Carmilla. Together, they are drawn into the confidence of their demanding poetry professor, De Lafontaine, who holds her own dark obsession with Carmilla.
But as their rivalry blossoms into something far more delicious, Laura must confront her own strange hungers. Tangled in a sinister game of politics, bloodthirsty professors and magic, Laura and Carmilla must decide how much they are willing to sacrifice in their ruthless pursuit of knowledge.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
When smart-mouthed Vanessa Lerner joins the high school basketball team Julie Parker coaches, Julie’s ready for the challenge. What she’s not ready for is Vanessa’s new foster parent, Elle Cochrane—former University of Tennessee basketball star. While star-struck at first, soon Julie persuades Elle to step into the unfilled position of assistant coach for the year.
Even though Elle has stayed out of the basketball world since an injury ended her short-lived WNBA career, the gig might be a way to become closer to Vanessa—and to spend more time with Julie, who makes Elle laugh. As the coaches grow closer, Elle has a hard time understanding how Julie is single. When Julie reveals her lifelong insecurity about dating and how she wishes it was more like sports—being able to practice first—it sparks an intriguing idea. While Elle still doubts her abilities as a basketball coach, helping Julie figure out dating is definitely something she can do. But as the basketball season progresses, and lines grow increasingly blurred, Julie and Elle must decide to join the game—or retreat to the sidelines.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | B&N
This is the sequel to What Moves the Dead.
After their terrifying ordeal at the Usher manor, Alex Easton feels as if they just survived another war. All they crave is rest, routine, and sunshine, but instead, as a favor to Angus and Miss Potter, they find themself heading to their family hunting lodge, deep in the cold, damp forests of their home country, Gallacia.
In theory, one can find relaxation in even the coldest and dampest of Gallacian autumns, but when Easton arrives, they find the caretaker dead, the lodge in disarray, and the grounds troubled by a strange, uncanny silence. The villagers whisper that a breath-stealing monster from folklore has taken up residence in Easton’s home. Easton knows better than to put too much stock in local superstitions, but they can tell that something is not quite right in their home. . . or in their dreams.
Hannah Tate can hardly believe her sleep-deprived eyes when she finds an engagement ring hidden in the closet. Killian, her super responsible, incredibly attractive boyfriend—and the father of her new baby, Bowie—is finally going to propose. But a romantic night out goes horribly wrong when Killian reveals he’s dumping Hannah, not proposing.
Furious and heartbroken, Hannah takes Bowie and moves in with her mama and stepdaddy in the mountains of Blue Ridge, Georgia. Hannah realizes that her parents’ cabin has vacation property gold written all over it—and could save her mama from going broke. Again.
Only problem? The cabin’s décor is . . . mildly terrifying and it’s in desperate need of renovation. Hannah hires the hot carpenter living in the treehouse next door to fix up the place. Not only does River respect Hannah’s business acumen, he looks at her like she’s a woman, not a hot mess. And Hannah can’t deny that River awakens something new inside her.
Can Hannah embrace a future that looks different from the picture-perfect family she once dreamed of . . . and maybe start living life on her own terms?
This is the second book in The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti
Mossa has returned to Valdegeld on a missing person’s case, for which she’ll once again need Pleiti’s insight. Seventeen students and staff members have disappeared from Valdegeld University—yet no one has noticed. The answers to this case may lie on the moon of Io—Mossa’s home—and the history of Jupiter’s original settlements during humanity’s exodus from Earth.
But Pleiti’s faith in her life’s work as a scholar of the past has grown precarious, and this new case threatens to further destabilize her dreams for humanity’s future, as well as her own.
Bugsy & Other Stories is a deliciously entertaining collection of six genre-defying stories. In the title story, “Bugsy,” a queer young adult battling depression finds community and transcendence through sex work.
In “Futago” a psychiatrist loses his mind after a voice—eerily similar to that of Alex Trebek—appears in his head.
In other stories, you will meet an e-girl and her fans, an elderly woman flashing through the pivotal scenes of her life, and a young boy on the spectrum trying to navigate life in a neurotypical world.
Together, these six stories explore tenderness and what it means to care for each other and for ourselves, especially in a time when technology threatens to tear us apart.
Bordeauxnuts is New York City magic, and it all belongs to Jamie Tolliver. A charming coffee and doughnut spot by day, Bordeauxnuts transforms with a sprinkle of powdered sugar into a cozy sophisticated wine bar each evening. Jamie’s enjoying a blueberry latte with her quirky band of regulars when a stunning and enigmatic stranger saunters in, flips her laptop open, and Jamie’s world upside down. Each time Jamie speaks to Leighton Morrow, her crush multiplies. She’s drawn to Leighton’s captivating presence, her kindness, and the faint lip print she leaves on her cup that winds a tingle up Jamie’s spine.
But sexy spine tingles can be deceiving.
Leighton Morrow didn’t set out to ruin anyone’s life, but she has a job to do. As a development coordinator for Carrington’s Department Store, Leighton’s part of the team that plans to take over the city block for the new location, including demolishing her new favorite café, Bordeauxnuts. A shame, but that’s life. She’ll miss the apple fritters and the cute owner. But work is a No Feelings Zone and she definitely cannot give in to the ones she has percolating for Jamie. Leighton and Jamie have all the ingredients to turn their attraction into love, but it’s a recipe for disaster.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | Bold Strokes Books
Jesse Logan doesn’t want a fresh start. He wants his old life back—before an injury made his career as a firefighter impossible, before his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s got so bad he doesn’t recognize Jesse anymore. When a friend tells him about a paid psychological study, Jesse sees it as a chance to get back to the man he was while making a little extra cash.
All Lulu Banks is asking for is a fresh start. Back home after a devastating breakup, she’s struggling to find her place. She’s always been a lot—too loud, too eager, too obvious about her feelings. The friendship study seems like a great idea…until she’s paired with Jesse Logan, who recently ghosted her after a blind date that led to a steamy make-out session.
Now that old familiar tension is back. Despite the program’s strict “no romance” rule, Jesse and Lulu are quick to find a work-around that allows them to explore their tenuous connection. And soon they’re on their way to total self-improvement…
As long as they don’t get caught.
In Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, Brontez Purnell―the bard of the underloved and overlooked―turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. “The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,” Purnell writes, “is simply existing.”
The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement.
Ellie Bishop is America’s sweetheart with a slew of award-winning rom-coms under her belt. Unfortunately for her, the sweet girl next door bit is tiresome and doesn’t allow her to show the acting world what she’s really capable of.
If only her manager would find the roles Ellie craves. When he comes with an offer for a reality TV show, Ellie is less than thrilled. Wild Celebrities is not the action-packed adventure she was looking for. In fact, this city slicker can’t think of anything worse than shipping off to God knows where for a month with only a backpack and a survival expert to keep her company. Her need for several caramel frappuccinos daily is legendary. There is no way in hell she’s going to subject herself to bugs and animals that could kill or eat her. No matter how much they offer to pay her.
Robin Stuart is looking for a new direction in life after working as a bodyguard for privileged divas. Not what she thought she would be doing after serving in the British Marines. That new direction comes in the form of Wild Celebrities when her best friend begs her to take his place. From the moment Robin finds out who her celebrity survivor is, she is sure of two things. One: Ellie Bishop is hot. Two: She’s going to be useless in the Amazon rainforest. The show is going to test more than Robin’s survival skills, of that she is sure!
When the unthinkable happens, Ellie and Robin and two crew members are catapulted into their worst nightmares. Robin is their only chance of making it out of the rainforest alive. Easier said than done. With lives on the line, can both women put aside their stark differences long enough to come up with an escape plan? Is there more to be found in the Amazon other than wild things?
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
The end isn’t the best time to realize you’ve been in love all along.
Bakery owner Harper has her secrets. She’s always kept to herself, constantly on a career climb that only she can see, with no one allowed close—except the one person in Bayview who won’t take no for an answer.
Paisley’s fallen into bed with Harper twice already over their years of friendship, but it’s never meant anything. Unless it has, in which case—well, she’d have to confront those feelings now, because Harper is on her way out of Bayview for good.
It’s too late now for the two of them to find all the things they could have been. But maybe the ending is the best time for a new beginning.
Buy it: Amazon
From the author of The Wicked Bargain comes a high-stakes race to defeat a curse designed to kill–about a teen demon who wants to be human, a boy cursed to die young, and the murderous island destined to bury them both.
Dami is a demon determined to cancel every deal they’ve ever made in order to tether their soul to earth and become human again. There’s just one person standing in their way: Silas. An irresistibly (and stubborn) cute boy cursed to die young, except for the deal with Dami that is keeping him alive. If they cancel the deal, Silas is dead. Unless… they can destroy the curse that has plagued Silas’s family for generations. But to do so, Dami and Silas are going to have to work together. That is, if the curse doesn’t kill them first. . . .
Jordan Elliott is a fat, nerdy lesbian, and the first junior to be named editor in chief of the school newspaper. Okay, that last part hasn’t happened yet, but it will. It’s positive thinking that has gotten Jordan this far. Ever since Mackenzie West, her friend-turned-enemy, humiliated her at the start of freshman year, Jordan has thrown herself into journalism and kept her eyes trained on the future.
So it’s a total blow when Jordan discovers that she not only didn’t get the editor in chief spot, but she’s been assigned the volleyball beat instead. And who is the star and newly crowned captain of the volleyball team? Mackenzie West. But words are Jordan’s weapon, and she has some ideas about how to exact a long-awaited revenge on her nemesis. Then things get murky when forced time together has Mack and Jordan falling back into their friendship, and into something more. And when Mack confesses the real reason she turned on Jordan freshman year, it has Jordan questioning everything—past, present, and future.
If Jordan lets her guard down and Mack in, will she get everything she wants, or will she be humiliated all over again?
This is the sequel to In the City of Time
In this heart-pumping sci-fi sequel to In the City of Time, two people have to work together to prevent the cataclysm that will soon break the laws of physics and render Earth uninhabitable.
Now in possession of the most dangerous book ever scribed, Willa and Saudade settle into the nineteenth century and start planning how to avert the cataclysm that will soon break the laws of physics and render Earth uninhabitable.
Faraz only wants his best friend, Leo, to have the time to come to terms with the death of his father—even if his father was a power-hungry villain who had to be stopped. But someone has stolen the editbook again, and now Faraz and his friends must track down Willa and challenge her for control of the editbook.
Meanwhile, Leo’s older brother Aris contemplates a path toward redemption after using the editbook to destroy the city of Napoli. Can he salvage his remaining relationships, after a lifetime of following their father?
But as far as Willa and Saudade are concerned, all these people are suspects in a crime that hasn’t happened yet.
An inspiring picture book biography about Glenn Burke, the first Major League Baseball player to come out as gay, and the story of how he created the world’s most recognizable handshake, the high five.
Playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Glenn Burke could do it all―hit, throw, run, field. He was the heart of the clubhouse who energized his teammates with his enthusiasm and love for the game. It was that energy that led Glenn to invent the high five one October day back in 1977―a spontaneous gesture after a home run that has since evolved into our universal celebratory greeting.
But despite creating this joyful symbol, Glenn Burke, a gay Black man, wasn’t always given support and shown acceptance in return.
From acclaimed author Phil Bildner, with illustrations from Daniel J. O’Brien, this moving picture book biography recognizes the challenges Burke faced while celebrating how his bravery and his now-famous handshake helped pave the way for others to live openly and free.
To cage a god is divine.
To be divine is to rule.
To rule is to destroy.
Using ancient secrets, Galina and Sera’s mother grafted gods into their bones. Bound to brutal deities and granted forbidden power no commoner has held in a millennia, the sisters have grown up to become living weapons. Raised to overthrow an empire―no matter the cost.
With their mother gone and their country on the brink of war, it falls to the sisters to take the helm of the rebellion and end the cruel reign of a royal family possessed by destructive gods. Because when the ruling alurea invade, they conquer with fire and blood. And when they clash, common folk burn.
While Sera reunites with her estranged lover turned violent rebel leader, Galina infiltrates the palace. In this world of deception and danger, her only refuge is an isolated princess, whose whip-smart tongue and sharp gaze threaten to uncover Galina’s secret. Torn between desire and duty, Galina must make a choice: work together to expose the lies of the empire―or bring it all down.
When PJ Spoon returns home for her beloved daddy’s funeral, she doesn’t expect to stick around. Why abandon her PhD program at Vanderbilt for the humble charms of her hometown, Pennywhistle, Tennessee? Mamma’s broken heart, that’s why. But truth be told, PJ’s own heart ain’t doing too good either. She impulsively takes a job as a fry cook at Pennywhistle’s beloved Chickie Shak, where locals gather for Nashville-style hot chicken. It may not be glamorous, but it’s something to do.
Fate shakes up PJ’s life again when the town rallies around the terribly retro and terribly fun Hot Chicken Pageant. PJ finally notices her cute redheaded coworker Boof, a singer-songwriter with a talent as striking as her curly hair, and learns to fear her smack-talking manager, Linda.
As PJ and Boof fall for each other, Boof’s search for her birth mother—a Pennywhistle native—catapults the budding couple into a mystery that might be better left unsolved. The Chickie Shak pageant takes off, spurring old rivalries and new friendships in this tale of unexpected connections and new beginnings.
Rosy is a bone familiar, gifted with the power to shift into animals marked with exposed bone. She spends most of her days in the magical Bone Forest, caring for her feral grandmother and hiding her powers to avoid conscription by the Witch King’s army. Until the day that Princess Shaw, a witch known as Death’s Heir, visits the Forest. When Rosy saves Shaw’s life, the princess offers her the chance to attend the prestigious school, Witch Hall, as payment. Though Rosy is wary of Shaw’s intentions, she cannot pass up the opportunity to find the cure for her grandmother’s affliction.
But at Witch Hall, Rosy finds herself embroiled in political games she doesn’t understand. Shaw wants Rosy for her entourage, a partner to help lead the coming war. All Rosy wants is to stay out of trouble until she can graduate and save her grandmother, but she can’t deny her attraction to Shaw or the comfort Shaw’s magic gives her. Will Rosy give in to her destiny, or will the Bone Forest call her home once and for all?
They say Mackerel Sky was founded when Captain Burrbank first saw Nimuë the Mermaid and forgot the sea. Stricken by love, he moored his tall ship and made camp on the highest cliff, hoping to forever gaze upon her beauty. That camp became a settlement, the settlement a town, the town a community both blessed and cursed by their tempestuous affair.
Three hundred years later, the legend of the Mermaid and the Captain who loved her still invigorates and haunts the inhabitants of the small Maine lobstering town. Take gruff widow Myra Kelley, who finds herself the de facto guardian of Leo Beale and knows his drunken antics are really attempts to escape an opiate-addicted mother and her boyfriends. Or Derrick Stowe, the town’s star pitcher, who wants nothing more than to read his mother’s musings on mermaids, write poetry to his secret boyfriend, and come out to his father, though he will learn how devastatingly small small towns can be. Or the oft-institutionalized Manon Perle, whose gorgeous, detailed quilts of the Mackerel Sky legend belie the terrible pain of—as she claims—having given her only child to the women in the waves.
In this close-knit town famous for its infamous mermaids, community is built through love and lore—willful elements that the townsfolk will have to harness if Mackerel Sky is to endure for another three hundred years.
At twenty-four, Hera is a clump of unmet potential. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She’s sharp in more ways than one, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job moderating the comments section of an online news outlet―a role even more mind-numbing than it sounds―introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she’s preferred women to men for years now, she soon finds herself falling into an all-consuming affair with him. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it! Well, except for the tiny hiccup that Arthur has a wife―and that she has no idea Hera exists.
Korinna has simple stay on the Navitas , stay out of trouble, and stay alive. She may be a Redseer, a blind priestess with the power to manipulate space-time, but she is the weakest in her Order. Useless and outcast. Or so she has been raised to believe.
As she takes her place as a navigator on an Imperium ship, Korinna’s full destiny is revealed to blood brimming with magic, she is meant to become a weapon of the Imperium, and pawn for the Order that raised her. But when the ship is attacked by the notorious pirate Aster Haran, Korinna’s world is ripped apart.
Aster has a vendetta against the Imperium, and an all-consuming, dark power that drives her to destroy everything in her path. She understands the world in a way Korinna has never imagined, and Korinna is drawn to her against her better judgment.
With the Imperium and the justice-seeking warrior Sahar hot on her heels, Korinna must choose her side, seize her power and fulfil her destiny–or risk imperiling the future of the galaxy, and destroying the fabric of space-time itself.
Ellie loves working in her local library in the small town of Ligonier. She loves baking scones and investigating the mysterious and captivating in her spare time. And there is nothing more mysterious and captivating than the intriguingly beautiful, too properly dressed woman sipping tea in her library who has appeared as if out of nowhere. The pull between them is undeniable, and Ellie is not sure that she wants to resist.
Prospero, a powerful witch from the magical land of Crenshaw, is often accused of being… ruthless in her goals and ambitions. But she is driven to save her dying homeland, and a prophecy tells her that Ellie is the key. Unbeknownst to Ellie, her powers have not yet awakened. But all of that is about to change.
An astonishing, epic graphic memoir in the spirit of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Meet little Maurice Vellekoop, the youngest of four children raised by Dutch immigrants in the 1970s in a blue-collar suburb of Toronto. Despite their working-class milieu, the Vellekoops are devoted to art, music, and film, and they instill a deep reverence for the arts in young Maurice—except for literature. He’d much rather watch Cher and Carol Burnett on TV than read a book. He also loves playing with his girlfriends’ Barbie dolls and helping his Mum in her hair salon, which she runs out of the basement of their house. In short, he is really, really gay. Which is a huge problem, because the family is part of the Christian Reformed Church, a strict Calvinist sect. They go to church twice on Sunday, and they send their kids to a private Christian school, catechism classes, and the Calvinist Cadet Corps. Needless to say, the church is intolerant of homosexuality. Though she loves her son deeply, Maurice’s mother, Ann, cannot accept him, setting the course for a long estrangement.
Vellekoop struggles through all of this until he graduates from high school and is accepted into the Ontario College of Art in the early 1980s. Here he finds a welcoming community of bohemians, including a brilliant, flamboyantly gay professor who encourages him to come out. But just as he’s dipping his toes into the waters of gay sex and love, a series of romantic disasters, followed by a violent attack, sets him back severely. And then the shadow of the AIDS era descends. Maurice reacts by retreating to the safety of childhood obsessions, and seeks to satisfy his emotional needs with film- and theatre-going, music, boozy self-medication, and prolific art-making. When these tactics inevitably fail, Vellekoop at last embarks on a journey towards his heart’s true desire. In psychotherapy, the spiderweb of family, faith, guilt, sexuality, mental health, the intergenerational fallout of World War II, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, French Formula Hairspray, and much more at last begins to untangle. But it’s going to be a long, messy, and occasionally hilarious process.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
Once upon a time, a vampire corrupted a hunter.
Octavia Beaumont, one of the original three vampires, is determined to run the city.
Red, an expert hunter, is hell-bent on getting revenge on the vampire that turned her sister.
When deadly trials for the heir of the city begin, Red and Octavia are forced to work together.
Octavia wants a crown.
Red wants blood.
But there’s only one first place.
To win, they’re going to have to trust each other. But teamwork is not easy when their past is filled with betrayal…
A betrayal Red can’t remember.
Someone is lying.
Someone has a secret.
Everyone has a hidden agenda.
The last thing Red and Octavia want to do is fall in love… But hearts remember, even when the mind doesn’t.
To win the trials and get revenge…
They must reveal a truth that will shatter their souls.
Remember a past that will break their hearts.
And fight a war that will change the face of the city forever.
Three tasks. Three choices. Three sacrifices.
All of them have a cruel price. The question is, are they willing to pay it?
Buy it: Amazon
Dick Kallman was an up-and-coming actor in the fifties and sixties—until he wasn’t. A costar on Broadway, a member of Lucille Ball’s historic Desilu workshop, and finally a primetime TV actor, Dick had hustled to get his big break. But just as soon as his star began to rise, his roles began to dry up and he faded from the spotlight, his name out of tabloids and newspapers until his sensational murder in 1980.
Through the eyes of his occasional pianist and longtime acquaintance Matt Liannetto, a tenderhearted but wry observer often on the fringes of Broadway’s big moments, Kallman’s life and death come into appallingly sharp focus. The actor’s yearslong, unrequited love for a fellow performer brings out a competitive, vindictive edge in him. Whenever a new door opens, Kallman rushes unwittingly to close it. Even as he walks over other people, he can never get out of his own way.
As Matt pores over the life of this handsome could-have-been, Up With the Sun re-creates the brassy, sometimes brutal world that shaped Kallman, capturing his collisions with not only Lucille Ball, but an array of stars from Sophie Tucker to Judy Garland and Johnny Carson. Part crime story, part showbiz history, and part love story, this is a crackling novel about personal demons and dangerously suppressed passions that spans thirty years of gay life—the whole tumultuous era from the Kinsey Report through Stonewall and, finally, AIDS.
Today’s post is sponsored by Beverly Gandara and What Did You Know and Who Did You Tell, out now!
When Did You Know and Who Did You Tell? LGBTQAI+/Biographies
Interviews with 25 diverse LGBTQAI+ Role Models
How would you cope if your family rejected you, your religion abandoned you and society labeled you an outcast? Read the Inspirational, heartfelt coming-out stories by 25 LGBTQAI+ role models from the ages of 21-80 who journeyed from strength to strength to become their authentic selves.
Buy it: Amazon
***
Nothing about Kess Pedrock’s life is normal. Not her home (she lives in her family’s Unnatural History Museum), not her interests (hunting for megafauna fossils and skeletons), and not her best friend (a talking demon’s head in a jar named Shrunken Jim).
But things get even stranger than usual when Kess meets Lilou Starling, the new girl in town. Lilou comes to Kess for help breaking a mysterious curse—and the only clue she has leads straight into the center of Eelgrass Bog. Everyone knows the bog is full of witches, demons, and possibly worse, but Kess and Lilou are determined not to let that stop them. As they investigate the mystery and uncover long-buried secrets, Kess begins to realize that the curse might hit closer to home than she’d ever expected, and she’ll have to summon all her courage to find a way to break it before it’s too late.
Tara just wants to be treated like any other girl at Ainsley Academy.
That is, judged on her merits—not on her transness. But there’s no road map for being the first trans girl at an all-girls school. And when she tries to join the Sibyls, an old-fashioned Ainsley sisterhood complete with code names and special privileges, she’s thrust into the center of a larger argument about what girlhood means and whether the club should exist at all.
Being the figurehead of a movement isn’t something Tara’s interested in. She’d rather read old speeches and hang out with the Sibyls who are on her side—especially Felicity, a new friend she thinks could turn into something more. Then the club’s sponsor, a famous alumna, attacks her in the media and turns the selection process into a spectacle.
Tara’s always found comfort in the power of other peoples’ words. But when it comes time to fight for herself, will she be able to find her own voice?
Continue reading Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Young Adult Fiction: January-June 2024
Sunday Times-bestselling author of A MARVELLOUS LIGHT ‘s SWORDCROSSED, pitched as Ellen Kushner’s SWORDSPOINT meets LEGENDS & LATTES; a second novel pitched as Grey’s Anatomy meets A DEADLY EDUCATION; an untitled novel; and an untitled novella, to Ruoxi Chen at Tor, in a six-figure deal, in a four-book deal, for publication in fall 2024, by Diana Fox at Fox Literary (US).
Happy Latinx Heritage Month! As usual, we’re celebrating with some books by Latinx authors and starring queer Latinx main characters! For even more recs, check out last year’s post!
Young Adult
For over a year, the Bronx has been plagued by sudden disappearances that no one can explain. Sixteen-year-old Raquel does her best to ignore it. After all, the police only look for the white kids. But when her crush Charlize’s cousin goes missing, Raquel starts to pay attention—especially when her own mom comes down with a mysterious illness that seems linked to the disappearances.
Raquel and Charlize team up to investigate, but they soon discover that everything is tied to a terrifying urban legend called the Echo Game. The game is rumored to trap people in a sinister world underneath the city, and the rules are based on a particularly dark chapter in New York’s past. And if the friends want to save their home and everyone they love, they will have to play the game and destroy the evil at its heart—or die trying.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
Ariana Ruiz wants to be noticed. But as an autistic girl who never talks, she goes largely ignored by her peers despite her bold fashion choices. So when cute, popular Luis starts to pay attention to her, Ari finally feels seen.
Luis’s attention soon turns to something more and they have sex at a party—while Ari didn’t say no, she definitely didn’t say yes. Before she has a chance to process what happened and decide if she even has the right to be mad at Luis, the rumor mill begins churning—thanks, she’s sure, to Luis’s ex-girlfriend, Shawni. Boys at school now see Ari as an easy target, someone who won’t say no.
Then Ari finds a mysterious note in her locker which eventually leads her to an unlikely group of students determined to expose Luis for the predator he is. To her surprise, she finds genuine friendship among the group, including her growing feelings for the very last girl she expected to fall for. But in order to take Luis down, she’ll have to come to terms with the truth of what he did to her that night—and risk everything to see justice done.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
Pedro and Daniel are Mexican American brothers growing up in 1970s Ohio. Their mother resents that Pedro is a spitting image of their darker-skinned father, that Daniel likes dolls, that neither boy plays sports.
Life at home is rough, but the boys have an unbreakable bond that will last their entire lives.
Together, the brothers manage an abusive home life, coming out, first loves, first jobs, and the AIDS pandemic, in a coming-of-age story unlike any other.
A scorned god.
A mysterious acolyte.
A forgetting drug.
A dangerous forest.
One girl caught between the freedom she always wanted and a sister she can’t bear to leave behind.
Under the cover of the Night Forest, will Lucha be able to step into her own power…or will she be consumed by it?
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
![Northranger by [Rey Terciero, Bre Indigo]](https://i0.wp.com/m.media-amazon.com/images/I/418iuTz7yxL.jpg?resize=169%2C255&ssl=1)
Cade has always loved to escape into the world of a good horror movie. After all, horror movies are scary—but to Cade, a closeted queer Latino teen growing up in rural Texas—real life can be way scarier.
When Cade is sent to spend the summer working as a ranch hand to help earn extra money for his family, he is horrified. Cade hates everything about the ranch, from the early mornings to the mountains of horse poop he has to clean up. The only silver lining is the company of the two teens who live there—in particular, the ruggedly handsome and enigmatic Henry.
But as unexpected sparks begin to fly between Cade and Henry, things get…complicated. Henry is reluctant to share the details of his mother’s death, and Cade begins to wonder what else he might be hiding. Inspired by the gothic romance of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and perfect for fans of Heartstopper and Bloom comes a modern love story so romantic it’s scary.
In this bilingual, inventive, and heartfelt debut, graphic novel talent Christine Suggs explores a trip they took to Mexico to visit family, embracing and rebelling against their heritage and finding a sense of belonging.
Sixteen-year-old Christine takes their first solo trip to Mexico to spend a few weeks with their grandparents and tía. At first, Christine struggles to connect with family they don’t yet share a language with. Seeing the places their mom grew up—the school she went to, the café where she had her first date with their father—Christine becomes more and more aware of the generational differences in their family.
Soon Christine settles into life in Mexico, eating pan dulce, drawing what they see, and growing more comfortable with Spanish. But when Mom joins their trip, Christine’s two worlds collide. They feel homesick for Texas, struggle against traditions, and miss being able to speak to their mom without translating. Eventually, through exploring the impacts of colonialism in both Mexico and themselves, they find their place in their family and start to feel comfortable with their mixed identity.
Adult
![The Sun and the Void (The Warring Gods Book 1) by [Gabriela Romero Lacruz]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Runw0ACEL.jpg)
Reina is desperate.
Stuck on the edges of society, Reina’s only hope lies in an invitation from a grandmother she’s never met. But the journey to her is dangerous, and prayer can’t always avert disaster.
Attacked by creatures that stalk the mountains, Reina is on the verge of death until her grandmother, a dark sorceress, intervenes. Now dependent on the Doña’s magic for her life, Reina will do anything to earn—and keep—her favor. Even the bidding of an ancient god who whispers to her at night.
Eva Kesaré is unwanted.
Illegitimate and of mixed heritage, Eva is her family’s shame. She tries to be the perfect daughter, but Eva is hiding a secret: Magic calls to her.
Eva knows she should fight the temptation. Magic is the sign of the dark god, and using it is punishable by death. Yet it’s hard to ignore power when it has always been denied you. Eva is walking a dangerous path. And in the end, she’ll become something she never imagined.
Buy it: Amazon | IndieBound
Sammy Espinoza’s life is a raging dumpster fire. Her desperate attempt to win back her singer ex-girlfriend has landed her in hot water at work, and she has one last chance before her editor cuts her column. Luckily, Sammy has a plan to redeem herself, but it won’t be easy.
Rumor has it that Max Ryan, the former rock god, is secretly recording his first-ever solo album years after he dramatically quit performing. And it just so happens that he and Sammy have history: Right before Max got his big break, he and Sammy spent an unforgettable night together.
Exclusive access to Max’s new music would guarantee Sammy’s professional comeback and, even better, give her the opportunity to serve some long-awaited revenge for his traumatic ghosting.
But Max lives in Ridley Falls, Washington, and Sammy has history there as well: a family that never wanted her and a million unanswered questions. Going back would mean confronting it all–but what else does she have to lose?
One last summer.
For Manuela del Carmen Caceres Galvan, the invitation to show her paintings at the 1889 Exposition Universelle came at the perfect time. Soon to be trapped in a loveless marriage, Manuela has given herself one last summer of freedom—in Paris, with her two best friends.
One scandalous encounter.
Cora Kempf Bristol, Duchess of Sundridge, is known for her ruthlessness in business. It’s not money she chases, but power. When she sees the opportunity to secure her position among her rivals, she does not hesitate. How difficult could it be to convince the mercurial Miss Caceres Galvan to part with a parcel of land she’s sworn never to sell?
One life-changing bargain.
Tempted by Cora’s offer, Manuela proposes a trade: her beloved land for a summer with the duchess in her corner of Paris. A taste of the wild, carefree world that will soon be out of her reach. What follows thrills and terrifies Cora, igniting desires the duchess long thought dead. As they fill their days indulging in a shared passion for the arts and their nights with dark and delicious deeds, the happiness that seemed impossible moves within reach…though claiming it would cause the greatest scandal Paris has seen in decades.
All’s Fair in Love and (Pastry) War
Sylvie Campos and Lauren Machado have hated each other since before they were born. For generations, the Campos and Machado families have blamed each other for stealing pastry recipes they claim their great-grandfathers originated before fleeing Castro’s Cuba.
Having spent their lives as rivals, Lauren and Sylvie are now in their early thirties and primed to take over their respective family bakeries. That means working long, hot, seasons of outdoor food festivals where they are forced to endure each other – albeit with a lot of bantering and barb-trading. After all, no one knows how to get under Sylvie’s skin like Lauren.
Sick of dealing with Lauren and her thieving family, Sylvie sets out to unmask the Machados for the traitors they are.
But when the truth is not what Sylvie expects, will the fiery exchanges between her and Lauren turn into something hot enough to melt away generational baggage? Could they get the chance to rekindle what they almost had in high school?
Santiago “Saint” Vega gets a second shot at love with Lola León, but when duty to his family forces him to do something she’ll never forgive, will everything he’s built come crumbling down?
Years ago, Saint walked away from the girl he loved to fulfill his duty. Now he’s struggling to build bridges between his drifting family, take on more responsibilities at his uncle’s construction company, figure out why his daughter refuses to talk at school and curtail his mischievous abuelo’s escalating pranks. Then she walks back into his life.
Social justice advocate Lola León has returned to Humboldt Park for two reasons: to help care for her dear abuelo and to serve the community center she loved, particularly the shelter for unhoused LGBTQIA+ youths. When she finds out that the Vegas are responsible for endangering both, she is more than ready to go to war—even if the boy she never forgot is standing at the front of the battlefield.
Neither of them expects to become allies in saving the shelter, helping Saint’s daughter or ending the decades-long feud between their grandfathers. They definitely don’t expect all of their old feelings to come rushing back. As Saint and Lola enter combat, they can’t help but wonder where the other’s true allegiance lies, and whether they’ll win these battles only to lose each other.
Escaping to NYU for college didn’t turn out the way Cameron planned—he’s flunking his theater classes, about to lose his scholarship, and he still hasn’t found anyone he can call his “people.” When he gets home for winter break, he’s so desperate to avoid a Conversation with his dad that he takes the first acting job he can get—as a mall elf. Despite how Scroogey he feels, the plus side is that there’s a cash prize for the most festive of Santa’s helpers.
But the competition is fierce—especially from fellow elf Marco. Christmas spirit oozes out of his veins. At first Cam is determined to see him as nothing but a rival, but as they spend more time together, Cam starts to second-guess himself. What if he’s finally found his people here—in the fakest consumerist nightmare place on Earth, where he least expected it?
Devin Báez is prepared for a relaxing winter break after his rough, first semester of art school. Sure, his family’s old Florida lake cabin is falling apart, and everything in it reminds him of his late mom. And yes, the Baezes’ next-door neighbors, the Seo-Cookes, are still petty, but things could be worse. That is, until Devin runs into the Seo-Cookes’ now annoyingly handsome son, Julian, who comes to him in need of a fake boyfriend.
Despite having a prestigious mentorship application and their beloved cabin to worry about, Devin reluctantly agrees under one condition: He can use the Seo-Cookes’ luxe vacation home to concentrate on his art. More importantly though, he can use his time there to infiltrate the rival’s domain and uncover secrets to prove they’ve been cheating at the Winter Games, an annual event where the Baezes have taken back-to-back Ls.
Passing off loathing as love is more difficult than it seems, especially when the stakes for this year’s competition are higher than ever. Bragging rights and the deed to the Baezes’ cabin is on the line. Julian may not be the pretentious jerk Devin thought he was, but with their families at each other’s throats, there’s no room for anything but fiction between them. Which is definitely a problem because Devin’s feelings for Julian are starting to feel very real.
Dami is a demon determined to cancel every deal they’ve ever made in order to tether their soul to earth and become human again. There’s just one person standing in their way: Silas. An irresistibly (and stubborn) cute boy cursed to die young, except for the deal with Dami that is keeping him alive. If they cancel the deal, Silas is dead. Unless… they can destroy the curse that has plagued Silas’s family for generations. But to do so, Dami and Silas are going to have to work together. That is, if the curse doesn’t kill them first. . . .
When a Mariachi star transfers schools, he expects to be handed his new group’s lead vocalist spot―what he gets instead is a tenacious current lead with a very familiar, very kissable face.
In a twenty-four-hour span, Rafael Alvarez led North Amistad High School’s Mariachi Alma de la Frontera to their eleventh consecutive first-place win in the Mariachi Extravaganza de Nacional; and met, made out with, and almost hooked up with one of the cutest guys he’s ever met.
Now eight months later, Rafie’s ready for one final win. What he didn’t plan for is his family moving to San Antonio before his senior year, forcing him to leave behind his group while dealing with the loss of the most important person in his life―his beloved abuelo. Another hitch in his plan: The Selena Quintanilla-Perez Academy’s Mariachi Todos Colores already has a lead vocalist, Rey Chavez―the boy Rafie made out with―who now stands between him winning and being the great Mariachi Rafie’s abuelo always believed him to be. Despite their newfound rivalry for center stage, Rafie can’t squash his feelings for Rey. Now he must decide between the people he’s known his entire life or the one just starting to get to know the real him.
High school friends Ray, Sophia, Joaquin, and Isabella embark on a perilous Halloween weekend to Malicia, a now defunct horror theme park off the coast of the Dominican Republic.
Ray enlisted his friends to help him make a documentary of the park where his mother and brother were murdered in a mass killing. But what Ray doesn’t know is that Joaquin, his crush, has a mysterious past of his own. With an impending hurricane and horrors around every corner, they all struggle to survive the park while discovering secrets about each other as their weekend adventure goes off the rails.
The group must not only face the deadly storm and their own inner demons, but also the ancient malignant presence on the island, threatening to plunge them into madness, and destroy them one by one.
No description is available for this one yet, but don’t you need it, just from the title? Of course you do.
The Soler sisters are infamous in polite society―brazen, rebellious, and raised by their fashionable grandmother who couldn’t care less about which fork goes where. But their grandmother also knows the standards that two Latina young ladies will be held to, so she secures them two coveted places at the Alarie House, a prominent finishing school that turns out first ladies, princesses, and socialites.
Younger sister Isla is back home within a day. She refuses to become one of the eerily sweet Alarie girls in their prim white dresses. Older sister Renata stays. When she returns months later, she’s unfailingly pleasant, unnervingly polite, and, Isla discovers, possibly murderous. And the same night she returns home, she vanishes.
As their grandmother uses every connection she has to find Renata, Isla re-enrolls, intent on finding out what happened to her sister. But the Alarie House is as exacting as it is opulent. It won’t give up its secrets easily, and neither will a mysterious, conniving girl who’s either controlling the house, or carrying out its deadly orders.
Happy International Nonbinary Day 2023! You know how we celebrate around here, so let’s get right to the books! (And of course, for more recs, check out past years’ posts!)
Middle Grade
Jude Winters might be in over their head. Maybe. But they’ll never admit it.
They befriend the ex-popular girl, Stevie Morgan, create an all-ages safe space at their local library with their best friend, Dallas Knight, and come out as nonbinary to their grandparents.
When the club becomes an overnight success, friendships crumble, and their grandparents act like they’re stuck in the Stone Age, Jude fights to keep their world from tearing itself apart. But a twelve-year-old can only handle so much.
Buy it: Amazon | Indigo | B&N | Book Depository | Ella Minnow Children’s Bookstore
![Jamie by [L.D. Lapinski]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51hCECpVViL.jpg)
Jamie Rambeau is a happy 11-year-old non-binary kid who likes nothing better than hanging out with their two best friends Daisy and Ash. But when the trio find out that in Year Seven they will be separated into one school for boys and another for girls, their friendship suddenly seems at risk. And when Jamie realises no one has thought about where they are going to go, they decide to take matters into their own hands, and sort it all out once and for all.
As the friends’ efforts to raise awareness eventually become a rooftop protest against the binary rules for the local schools, Jamie realises that if they don’t figure out a way forwards, they might be at risk of losing both their friends forever.
Buy it: Amazon | Waterstones
Young Adult
Sixteen-year-old Bianca Torre is an avid birder undergoing a gender identity crisis and grappling with an ever-growing list of fears.
Some, like Fear #6: Initiating Conversation, keep them constrained, forcing them to watch birds from the telescope in their bedroom. And, occasionally, their neighbors. When their gaze wanders from the birds to one particular window across the street, Bianca witnesses a creepy plague-masked murderer take their neighbor’s life.
Worse, the death is ruled a suicide, forcing Bianca to make a choice—succumb to their long list of fears (including #3 Murder and #55 Breaking into a Dead Guy’s Apartment), or investigate what happened.
Bianca enlists the help of their friend Anderson Coleman, but the two have more knowledge of anime than true crime. As Bianca and Anderson dig deeper into the murder with a little help from Bianca’s crush and fellow birding aficionado, Elaine Yee (#13 Beautiful People, #11 Parents Discovering They’re a Raging Lesbian), the trio uncover a conspiracy much larger—and weirder—than imagined. But when the killer catches wind of the investigation, Bianca’s #1 fear of public speaking doesn’t sound so bad under the threat of being silenced for good.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
Finding home. Falling in love. Fighting to belong.
The Santos Vista neighborhood of San Antonio, Texas, is all Ander Lopez has ever known. The smell of pan dulce. The mixture of Spanish and English filling the streets. And, especially their job at their family’s taquería. It’s the place that has inspired Ander as a muralist, and, as they get ready to leave for art school, it’s all of these things that give them hesitancy. That give them the thought, are they ready to leave it all behind?
To keep Ander from becoming complacent during their gap year, their family “fires” them so they can transition from restaurant life to focusing on their murals and prepare for college. That is, until they meet Santiago Garcia, the hot new waiter. Falling for each other becomes as natural as breathing. Through Santi’s eyes, Ander starts to understand who they are and want to be as an artist, and Ander becomes Santi’s first steps toward making Santos Vista and the United States feel like home.
Until ICE agents come for Santi, and Ander realizes how fragile that sense of home is. How love can only hold on so long when the whole world is against them. And when, eventually, the world starts to win.
Buy it: Amazon | IndieBound
Edison Rooker isn’t sure what to expect when he enters the office of Antonia Hex, the powerful sorceress who runs a call center for magical emergencies. He doesn’t have much experience with hexes or curses. Heck, he doesn’t even have magic. But he does have a plan—to regain the access to the magical world he lost when his grandmother passed.
Antonia is…intimidating, but she gives him a job and a new name—Rook—both of which he’s happy to accept. Now all Rook has to do is keep his Spell Binder, an illegal magical detection device, hidden from the Magical Consortium. And contend with Sun, the grumpy and annoyingly cute apprentice to Antonia’s rival colleague, Fable. But dealing with competition isn’t so bad; as Sun seems to pop up more and more, and Rook minds less and less.
But when the Consortium gets wind of Rook’s Spell Binder, they come for Antonia. All alone, Rook runs to the only other magical person he knows: Sun. Except Fable has also been attacked, and now Rook and Sun have no choice but to work together to get their mentors back…or face losing their magic forever.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
El Diablo is in the details in this Latinx pirate fantasy starring a transmasculine nonbinary teen with a mission of revenge, redemption, and revolution.
On Mar León-de la Rosa’s 16th birthday, el Diablo comes calling. Mar is a transmasculine nonbinary teen pirate hiding a magical ability to manipulate fire and ice. But their magic isn’t enough to reverse a wicked bargain made by their father and now el Diablo has come to collect his payment: the soul of Mar’s father and the entire crew of their ship.
When Mar is miraculously rescued by the sole remaining pirate crew in the Caribbean, el Diablo returns to give them a choice: give up your soul to save your father by the Harvest Moon or never see him again. The task is impossible–Mar refuses to make a bargain and there’s no way their magic is any match for el Diablo. Then, Mar finds the most unlikely allies: Bas, an infuriatingly arrogant and handsome pirate — and the captain’s son; and Dami, a genderfluid demonio whose motives are never quite clear. For the first time in their life, Mar may have the courage to use their magic. It could be their only redemption — or it could mean certain death.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
Eli Peterson is a self-taught, up-and-coming makeup artist in the cosplay scene who is barely making ends meet. While they might be slaying it with their breathtaking looks, they’re also trying to save enough money for top surgery and convince their parents that their artistic dream is worthwhile. During a convention, Eli hears about Makeup Wars, a competition that could change everything . . .
The grand prize? A scholarship to Beyond, the best SFX school on the West Coast. The problem? Going head-to-head with the most talented up-and-coming makeup artists in the scene—including rival influencer Zachary Miller, their ex-boyfriend. Eli will have to juggle their makeup brushes, their rekindled feelings for Zach, and their self-doubt in order to win everything they’ve ever wanted: a chance to chase their dream and a second chance at love.
Buy it: Bookshop | B&N | Amazon | Indigo | IndieBound
Keep your enemy closer.
Cade McKenna is a transgender prince who’s doubling for his brother.
Valencia Palafox is a young dama attending the future queen of Eliana.
Gael Palma is the infamous boy assassin Cade has vowed to protect.
Patrick McKenna is the reluctant heir to a kingdom, and the prince Gael has vowed to destroy.
Cade doesn’t know that Gael and Valencia are the same person.
Valencia doesn’t know that every time she thinks she’s fighting Patrick, she’s fighting Cade.
And when Cade and Valencia blame each other for a devastating enchantment that takes both their families, neither of them realizes that they have far more dangerous enemies.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
In becoming a vampire, I’m less than a girl. And more.
Or maybe I’m becoming what I always have been, deep inside.
A blade.
When nineteen-year-old Fin volunteers to take her secret love’s place in their village’s Finding, she is terrified. Those who are chosen at the Finding are whisked away to Castle Courtsheart, a vampire school where human students either succeed and become vampires, fail and spend the rest of their lives as human thralls…or they don’t survive long enough to become either.
Fin is determined to forge a different path: learn how to kill the undead and get revenge for her mother, who was taken by the vampires years ago. But Courtsheart is as captivating as it is deadly, and Fin is quickly swept up in her new world and its inhabitants – particularly Gavron, her handsome and hostile vampire maker, whose blood is nothing short of intoxicating. As Fin begins to discover new aspects of her own identity and test her newfound powers, she stumbles across a string of murders that may be connected to a larger ritual – one with potentially lethal consequences for vampires and humans alike. Fin must uncover the truth and find the killer before she loses her life…or betrays her own heart.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
Transness is as varied and colorful as magic can be. In Transmogrify!, you’ll embark on fourteen different adventures alongside unforgettable characters who embody many different genders and expressions and experiences—because magic is for everyone, and that is cause for celebration.
Featuring stories from:
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
Will is a 17-year-old on the cusp of freedom: freedom from providing and caring for their abusive, addicted mother, freedom from their small town with an even smaller mindset, and the freedom from having to hide who they truly are. When their drug dealer mother dies months before their 18th birthday, Will is granted their freedom earlier than expected. But their mother’s last words haunt Will: She cursed them with her dying breath, claiming her death was their fault. Soon their mother’s drug-dealing past threatens Will’s new shiny future, leaving Will scrambling to find their beloved former foster mother Raz before Child Protective Services or local drug dealers find them first. But how do you reconnect with family and embark on a new love when you’re convinced you destroy everything you touch?
Buy it: Amazon | IndieBound
Adult Fiction
It’s 2003, and artist Dawn Levit is stuck. A bookbinder who works in conservation at the Met, she spends her free time scouting the city’s street art, hoping something might spark inspiration. Instead, everything looks like a dead end. And art isn’t the only thing that feels wrong: wherever she turns, her gender identity clashes with the rest of her life. Her relationship, once anchored by shared queerness, is falling apart as her boyfriend Lukas increasingly seems to be attracted to Dawn only when she’s at her most masculine. Meanwhile at work, Dawn has to present as female, even on the days when that isn’t true. Either way, her difference feels like a liability.
Then, one day at work, Dawn finds something hidden behind the endpaper of an old book: the torn-off cover of a ‘50s lesbian pulp novel, Turn Her About. On the front is a campy illustration of a woman looking into a handheld mirror and seeing a man’s face. And on the back is a love letter.
Dawn latches onto the coincidence, becoming obsessed with tracking down the note’s author. Her fixation only increases when her best friend Jae is injured in a hate crime, for which Dawn feels responsible. As Dawn searches for the letter’s author, she is also looking for herself. She tries to understand how to live in a world that doesn’t see her as she truly is, how to get unstuck in her gender, and how to rediscover her art, and she can’t shake the feeling that the note’s author might be able to help guide her to the answers.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
![Something Spectacular (Something Fabulous) by [Alexis Hall]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51QXMtjBMPL.jpg)
Peggy Delancey’s not at all ready to move on from her former flame, Arabella Tarleton. But Belle has her own plans for a love match, and she needs Peggy’s help to make those plans a reality. Still hung up on her feelings and unable to deny Belle what she wants, Peggy reluctantly agrees to help her woo the famous and flamboyant opera singer Orfeo.
She certainly doesn’t expect to find common ground with a celebrated soprano, but when Peggy and Orfeo meet, a whole new flame is ignited that she can’t ignore. Peggy finds an immediate kinship with Orfeo, a castrato who’s just as nonconforming as she is—and just as affected by their instant connection.
They’ve never been able to find their place in the world, but as the pair walks the line between friendship, flirtation, and something more, they may just find their place with each other.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
Newly-out trans artist’s assistant Sammie is invited to an old friend’s bachelor weekend in El Campo, a hedonistic wonderland of a city floating in the Atlantic Ocean’s international waters—think Las Vegas with even fewer rules. Though they have not identified as a man for over a year, Sammie’s college buddies haven’t quite gotten the message—as evidenced by their formerly closest friend Adam asking them to be his “best man.”
Arriving at the swanky hotel, Sammie immediately questions their decision to come. Bad enough that they have to suffer through a torrent of passive-aggressive comments from the groom’s pals—all met with zero pushpack from supposed “nice guy” Adam. But also, they seem to be the only one who’s noticed the mysterious cult that’s also staying at the hotel, and is ritually dismembering guests and demanding fealty to their bloodthirsty god.
Part satire, part horror, Boys Weekend explores what it’s like to exist as a transfemme person in a man’s world, the difficulty of maintaining friendships through transition, and the more cult-like effects of masculinity, “hustle” culture, and capitalism—all through the vibrant lens of a surreal, scary, and immensely imaginative romp.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
![The Heartbreak Handshake (Clover Hill Romance Book 4) by [J.R. Hart]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51VDKJIk7wL.jpg)
Paxton McKee, Clover Hill’s rideshare driver and handyman, is known by his customers as responsible, dependable, and loyal. On first dates, though, he’s known by another word: boring. His dates never seem to appreciate his in-depth knowledge of famous aviation disasters or his LEGO expertise. His book club buddy, Mrs. Sawyer, keeps trying to set him up. But after so many failed dates, Paxton’s given up on finding someone who can accept him, special interests, stims, and all.
Hand-crafter Remi Sawyer put Clover Hill in their rear-view mirror to sell at craft fairs across the country. But being a traveling artisan is harder than Remi thought. With mounting bills, they’ve ended up back home. Being in their old teenage bedroom is weird. Weirder, their mother keeps trying to set them up on dates, even after they’ve made it clear the homecoming is temporary.
To get Mrs. Sawyer off their backs, Paxton and Remi agree on a scheme: they’ll go on three dates. When it’s over, Paxton can pretend to be heartbroken, and Remi can get back on the road. They even shake on it. But awkward dates lead to the realization the two have a lot in common. Kissing is gross? Check. Spending quiet time doing projects together is enjoyable? Double check.
But Remi is still hell-bent on leaving Clover Hill again, and Paxton is dead-set on staying. Can they find a new vision that doesn’t involve Remi leaving their kindred spirit behind, or are they both destined to lose the person who might be their perfect companion?
Buy it: Amazon
This is the fourth book in the Five Crowns of Okrith quintet
If allowed, Neelo Emberspear would never leave the library. Reluctant to take the throne despite their mother’s faltering health, the neurodivergent bookworm craves escape from their arranged marriage to charming fae warrior Talhan Catullus. But they know their duty can be put off no longer when their mother, the drug-addled queen, disastrously lights the castle on fire.
Fighting to save their mother’s life and keep her on the throne, Neelo is astonished when bonding over the written word brings them closer than ever to their cavalier, soon-to-be husband. But the non-binary heir’s growing affections may be cut short with witch uprisings threatening to topple the entire continent.
Can Neelo claim both love and dominion before their court is reduced to ash?
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
![A Zookeeper's Guide to Dating (The T-Guides: A Transgender MM Romance Series) by [Roan Rosser, Ian M. Keller]](https://i0.wp.com/m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41OBMUOtobL.jpg?resize=179%2C286&ssl=1)
Wallflower janitor Emily has dreamed of being a zookeeper their entire life. But they’ve been passed over again and again for promotion. Asked out by a gay man who thinks they’re named ‘Emil,’ they feel happy for the first time in forever.
Jeremi is outgoing, friendly, driven… and his forgetfulness has lost him more boyfriends than he can count. When he meets an adorable twink at the zoo, Jeremi vows: this time will be different.
Their first date tanks.
Jeremi tries to salvage things by offering to be Emil’s job coach, yet he can’t help but want to be more than just friends.
As Emil’s egg cracks and their self-confidence grows, Emil yearns for more from Jeremi. Yet they worry they’re not what Jeremi is looking for…
Is their relationship doomed to die in captivity?
Buy it: Amazon
When Guinevere “Nev” Tallow receives an acceptance letter to the exclusive Deephaven Academy, they know it’s the fresh start that they’ve been looking for.
But things are strange from the moment they arrive—the house itself seems to breathe, students whisper secrets in dark corridors, and the entire east wing of the academy is locked away for reasons no one wants to explain. And Nev knows something ragged stalks the shadowy corridors, something that sobs quietly and scratches at the walls, waiting to be released.
With the help of another first-year student, Nev takes it upon themselves to unravel the mysteries hidden in Deephaven’s halls. But will they risk their fresh start to bring the academy’s secret to light?
The Otherwoods is calling. And it won’t be ignored.
Some would call River Rydell a ‘chosen one’: born with the ability to see monsters and travel to a terrifying spirit world called The Otherwoods, they have all the makings of a hero. But River just calls themself unlucky. After all, it’s not like anyone actually believes River can see these things-or that anyone even believes monsters exist in the first place. So the way River sees it, it’s better to keep their head down and ignore anything Otherwoods related.
But The Otherwoods won’t be ignored any longer.
When River’s only friend (and crush) Avery is kidnapped and dragged into The Otherwoods by monsters, River has no choice but to confront the world they’ve seen only in their nightmares-but reality turns out be more horrifying than they could have ever imagined. With only their cat for protection and a wayward teen spirit as their guide, River must face the monsters of The Otherwoods and their own fears to save Avery and become the hero they were (unfortunately) destined to be.
Rat Evans, nonbinary heir to one of the oldest magical bloodlines in New York, doesn’t cast spells anymore. For as long as Rat can remember, they’ve been surrounded by doorways no one else sees and corridors that aren’t on any map. Then one day, they opened a passage and found a broken tower in a field of weeds—and something followed them back.
When Rat is accepted into Bellamy Arts, all they want is a place to hide and to make sure they never open another passageway again. But when the only other person who knows what really happened last year—Harker Blakely, the dangerously gifted trans boy who used to be Rat’s closest friend—turns up on campus, Rat begins to realize that Bellamy Arts might not be as safe as they’d thought. And the tower might not be through with them yet.
Soon, Rat finds themself caught in a web of secrets and long-buried magic, with their friend-turned-enemy at their throat. But the closer they come to uncovering the truth about the tower, the further they’re drawn toward the unsettling powers that threaten to swallow them whole.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
![The Stars and the Stage: A Queer Second Chance Vampire Romance Novella by [D. N. Bryn]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51iT0wqr36L.jpg)
“If you want to prove yourself, then bleed for me.”
Diego refuses to see themselves as their society’s monster. Since fleeing their hometown—and the high school sweetheart who spurned their fangs—a decade ago, they’ve found a new home with the staff of a sensual role play club that creates fantasies for vampire-human couples. Working as the temporary stand in for humans with no vampire of their own, impassioned romance now seems like a thing of the past.
That is, until Diego’s traitorous high school flame reappears in a storm of drama, claiming he’s finally ready to earn their forgiveness—in whatever way Diego demands of him.
The man now trying to woo them back isn’t quite the one they remember; he’s aggressively forthright, persistently self-sacrificing, and strong in ways Diego could never have fathomed. But his sudden re-emergence comes just as the club is under threat, and any good thing might just be too good to be true.
Explore the wider world of the Guides for Dating Vampires series with this standalone novella set in Los Angles in the 90s, where a fiery sub/dom second chance romance blooms between the transmasc-NB/M couple.
Buy it: Amazon
Middle-grade superstar author Alex Gino returns to the world they began with MELISSA and RICK with GREEN, the story of a non-binary middle-schooler named Green who comes into their own in no small part by fighting for gender-free casting in their school’s production of THE WIZARD OF OZ.
All Elle Campbell wants to do is meet their hero, non-binary icon Nuri Grena. Well, okay, they’d like a bit more than that — they’d like to learn how to do cat eye makeup, for queen bee Casey to stop critiquing their outfits, and for the finale of Elle’s favorite show to have been less terrible. But meeting Nuri means the most of all.
So when Elle learns that Nuri is coming to town for book signing on Saturday, Elle is thrilled. It’s the perfect chance to meet their hero! Elle’s never been happier since they came out as non-binary, but they have a lot of questions — questions only Nuri can answer.
But Elle’s dreams are dashed when an altercation with a surly substitute teacher lands Elle in Saturday detention. Elle is ready to give up until their two best friends come up with a plan to bust them out of school. A plan so outrageous, it just might work.
Yet that’s just step one. The kids also have to make their way across town with no money, no phones… and no driver’s licenses. But they refuse to give up — even if that means “borrowing” scooters from elementary school loan sharks, or winning a laser tag tournament with a cash prize.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
This is the sequel to Sir Callie and the Champions of Helston
Thanks to Callie and their friends, Helston seems to be changing for the better: Boys are allowed to explore their magic, and girls are permitted to train as warriors. Callie is an official Helston page, Willow in on track to become king, and Elowen and Edwyn are finally safe and free of their father. Everything is…perfect.
Except it isn’t.
Not in Helston, where every step forward is accompanied by a storm of opposition. Even Queen Ewella and Sir Nick are struggling against the wave of fear and anti-magical sentiment growing daily, while the encroaching threat from across the bridge looms.
Callie isn’t foolish; they notice the suspicious glances thrown Neal’s way and hear the doubtful murmurs following Willow. They know what people think about them, too. Tolerance is not the same as acceptance, and when the fragile peace finally shatters, Callie and their friends have no choice but to leave their home and run.
On the other side of the bridge, old secrets are revealed and new allegiances are formed that will throw into question everything Callie thought they knew about their world. Including what it means to be a hero.
Orphaned young and raised with chilly indifference at an all-boys boarding school, Brontë Ellis has grown up stifled by rigid rules and social “norms,” forbidden from expressing his gender identity. His beloved novels and period films lend an escape, until a position as a live-in tutor provides him with a chance to leave St. Mary’s behind.
Greenwood Manor is the kind of elegant country house Bron has only read about, and amid lavish parties and cricket matches the Edwards family welcomes him into the household with true warmth. Mr. Edwards and the young Ada, Bron’s pupil, accept without question that Bron’s gender presentation is not traditionally masculine. Only Darcy, the eldest son, seems uncomfortable with Bron—the two of them couldn’t be more opposite.
When a tragic fire blazes through the estate’s idyllic peace, Bron begins to sense dark secrets smoldering beneath Greenwood Manor’s surface. Channeling the heroines of his cherished paperbacks, he begins to sift through the wreckage. Soon, he’s not sure what to believe, especially with his increasing attraction to Darcy clouding his vision.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | B&N
![Godly Heathens: A Novel (The Ouroboros Book 1) by [H.E. Edgmon]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41uUXHFU9WL.jpg)
Gem Echols is a nonbinary Seminole teen living in the tiny town of Gracie, Georgia. Known for being their peers’ queer awakening, Gem leans hard on charm to disguise the anxious mess they are beneath. The only person privy to their authentic self is another trans kid, Enzo, who’s a thousand long, painful miles away in Brooklyn.
But even Enzo doesn’t know about Gem’s dreams, haunting visions of magic and violence that have always felt too real. So how the hell does Willa Mae Hardy? The strange new girl in town acts like she and Gem are old companions, and seems to know things about them they’ve never told anyone else.
When Gem is attacked by a stranger claiming to be the Goddess of Death, Willa Mae saves their life and finally offers some answers. She and Gem are reincarnated gods who’ve known and loved each other across lifetimes. But Gem – or at least who Gem used to be – hasn’t always been the most benevolent deity. They’ve made a lot of enemies in the pantheon—enemies who, like the Goddess of Death, will keep coming.
It’s a good thing they’ve still got Enzo. But as worlds collide and the past catches up with the present, Gem will discover that everyone has something to hide.
![Okay, Cupid by [Mason Deaver]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51GPGfGKQZL.jpg)
As a cupid, Jude thinks they understand love a little bit more than the average human. It makes sense — Jude’s been studying love their whole teen life. And, yes, there have been some bumps in the road, and they’re currently on probation for doing something that they absolutely, definitely shouldn’t have done… but they’re ready to prove they can make matches without ever getting involved.
Only… Jude’s next assignment isn’t about setting up two adults. No, this time Jude has to go to high school, with kids their own age. And the assignment is a tough one: two best friends who are meant to be more than just best friends… but who aren’t currently speaking to each other after a huge falling out.
Jude thinks they’ve got this one all under control, and that they won’t get involved whatsoever.
Which proves that maybe Jude hasn’t learned the first lesson of humans and love … It’s complicated.
From the author of The Wicked Bargain comes a high-stakes race to defeat a curse designed to kill–about a teen demon who wants to be human, a boy cursed to die young, and the murderous island destined to bury them both.
Dami is a demon determined to cancel every deal they’ve ever made in order to tether their soul to earth and become human again. There’s just one person standing in their way: Silas. An irresistibly (and stubborn) cute boy cursed to die young, except for the deal with Dami that is keeping him alive. If they cancel the deal, Silas is dead. Unless… they can destroy the curse that has plagued Silas’s family for generations. But to do so, Dami and Silas are going to have to work together. That is, if the curse doesn’t kill them first. . . .
A little domestic bliss never hurt anyone…right?
Charlie Dee is headed for burnout. They’ve been burned before, both by their bio family and the now-defunct queer collective they once called home. So when they’re asked to take a work trip outside the city, they jump at the chance. Sure, it’s additional work with no additional pay, but it’s also an excuse to get out of town—and out of their own head.
That dream is shattered when Charlie opens the door to their supposedly private rental. There’s a bird on the loose, circling the living room as it’s chased by a cat, who is chased by a small child. The girl’s parents, Hayden and Buffy, only manage to add to the chaos. They promise to leave first thing in the morning, but when a massive snowstorm rolls in, this overnight trip becomes a weeklong affair.
Reluctantly charmed by this unfiltered—if forced—look at a loving, healthy family, Charlie begins to develop feelings for both Hayden and Buffy. And they both seem to be flirting back. But when the promise of a promotion lures Charlie back to the city, all three will have to decide where they go from here—and what it means to truly feel at home.
Buy it: Amazon
It’s Trans Day of Visibility, and we’re celebrating (as we celebrate everything) with a whole bunch of great trans books! As always, this post only includes titles that were not included in full in past posts, but definitely check those out for even more trans lit goodness!
Halfway through sixth grade, Noah’s best friend and the only other trans boy in his school, Lewis, passed away in a car accident. Lewis was adventurous and curious, always bringing a new paranormal story to share with Noah. Together they daydreamed about cryptids and shared discovering their genders and names. After his death, lonely and yearning for someone who could understand him like Lewis once did, Noah starts writing letters to Mothman, wondering if he would understand how Noah feels and also looking for evidence of Mothman’s existence in the vast woods surrounding his small Poconos town. Noah becomes determined to make his science fair project about Mothman, despite his teachers and parents urging him to make a project about something “real.”
Meanwhile, as Noah tries to find Mothman, Noah also starts to make friends with a group of girls in his grade, Hanna, Molly, and Alice, with whom he’d been friendly, but never close to. Now, they welcome him, and he starts to open up to each of them, especially Hanna, who Noah has a crush on. But as strange things start to happen and Noah becomes sure of Mothman’s existence, his parents and teachers don’t believe him. Noah decides it’s up to him to risk everything, trek into the woods, and find Mothman himself.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
Twelve-year-old Abigail (she/her/hers) is so excited to spend her summer at Camp QUILTBAG, an inclusive retreat for queer and trans kids. She can’t wait to find a community where she can be herself—and, she hopes, admit her crush on Laura Dern to kids who will understand.
Thirteen-year-old Kai (e/em/eir) is not as excited. E just wants to hang out with eir best friend and eir parkour team. And e definitely does not want to think about the incident that left eir arm in a sling—the incident that also made Kai’s parents determined to send em somewhere e can feel like emself.
After a bit of a rocky start at camp, Abigail and Kai make a pact to help each other find their footing, all while navigating crushes, their queer identities, and a competition pitting cabin against cabin.
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Eleven-year-old Simon and his siblings, Talia and Rose, are staying the week at Nanaleen’s century-old house. This time, though, it’s not their usual summer vacation trip. In fact, everything’s different. It’s fall, not summer. Mom and Dad are staying behind to have a “talk.” And Nanaleen’s house smells weird, plus she keeps forgetting things. And these aren’t the only things getting under Simon’s skin: He’s the only one who knows that his name is Simon, and that he and him pronouns are starting to feel right. But he’s not ready to add to the changes that are already in motion in his family.
To make matters worse, Simon keeps hearing a scratching in the walls, and shadows are beginning to build in the corners. He can’t shake the feeling that something is deeply wrong…and he’s determined to get to the bottom of it—which means launching a ghost hunt, with or without his sisters’ help. When Simon discovers the hidden story of his great-aunt Brie, he realizes that Brie’s life might hold answers to some of his worries. Is Brie’s ghost haunting the old O’Hagan house? And will Simon’s search for ghosts turn up more secrets than he ever expected?
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Sixteen-year-old trans boy Miles Jacobson has two New Year’s resolutions: 1) win back his ex-boyfriend (and star of the football team) Shane McIntyre, and 2) finally beat his slimy arch-nemesis at the Midwest’s biggest classical piano competition. But that’s not going to be so easy. For one thing, Shane broke up with Miles two weeks after Miles came out as trans, and now Shane’s stubbornly ignoring him, even when they literally bump into each other. Plus, Miles’ new, slightly terrifying piano teacher keeps telling him that he’s playing like he “doesn’t know who he is”—whatever that means.
Then Miles meets the new boy in town, Eric Mendez, a proudly queer cartoonist from Seattle who asks his pronouns, cares about art as much as he does—and makes his stomach flutter. Not what he needs to be focusing on right now. But after Eric and Miles pretend to date so they can score an invite to a couples-only Valentine’s party, the ruse turns real with a kiss…which is also definitely not in the plan. Why does Eric like him so much, anyway? It’s not like he’s cool or confident or comfortable in his own skin. He’s not even good enough at piano to get his fellow competitors to respect him…especially now, as Miles. Nothing’s ever been as easy for him as for other people—other boys. He’s only ever been almost enough.
So why, when he’s with Eric, does it feel like the only person he’s ever really not been enough for…is himself?
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El Diablo is in the details in this Latinx pirate fantasy starring a transmasculine nonbinary teen with a mission of revenge, redemption, and revolution.
On Mar León-de la Rosa’s 16th birthday, el Diablo comes calling. Mar is a transmasculine nonbinary teen pirate hiding a magical ability to manipulate fire and ice. But their magic isn’t enough to reverse a wicked bargain made by their father and now el Diablo has come to collect his payment: the soul of Mar’s father and the entire crew of their ship.
When Mar is miraculously rescued by the sole remaining pirate crew in the Caribbean, el Diablo returns to give them a choice: give up your soul to save your father by the Harvest Moon or never see him again. The task is impossible–Mar refuses to make a bargain and there’s no way their magic is any match for el Diablo. Then, Mar finds the most unlikely allies: Bas, an infuriatingly arrogant and handsome pirate — and the captain’s son; and Dami, a genderfluid demonio whose motives are never quite clear. For the first time in their life, Mar may have the courage to use their magic. It could be their only redemption — or it could mean certain death.
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Seventeen-year-old Gael is used to keeping to himself. Though his best friend convinces him to attend a meeting of Plus, a support group for LGBTQIA+ teens, Gael doesn’t plan on sharing much. Where would he even start?
Between supporting his mother through her bouts of depression, dealing with his estranged father, and navigating senior year as a transgender boy at a conservative Tennessean high school, his life is a lot to unload on strangers.
But after meeting easygoing Declan, Gael is welcomed into a new circle of friends who make him want to open up. As Gael’s friendship with Declan develops into something more, he finds himself caught between his mother’s worsening mental health and his father’s attempts to reconnect.
After tragedy strikes, Gael must decide if he can risk letting the walls around his heart down and fully opening up to those who care for him.
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New York City, 1922. Nicolás Caraveo, a 17-year-old transgender boy from Wisconsin, has no interest in the city’s glamor. Going to New York is all about establishing himself as a young professional, which could set up his future—and his life as a man—and benefit his family.
Nick rents a small house in West Egg from his 18-year-old cousin, Daisy Fabrega, who lives in fashionable East Egg near her wealthy fiancé, Tom—and Nick is shocked to find that his cousin now goes by Daisy Fay, has erased all signs of her Latina heritage, and now passes seamlessly as white.
Nick’s neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious young man named Jay Gatsby, whose castle-like mansion is the stage for parties so extravagant that they both dazzle and terrify Nick. At one of these parties, Nick learns that the spectacle is all for the benefit of impressing a girl from Jay’s past—Daisy. And he learns something else: Jay is also transgender.
As Nick is pulled deeper into the glittery culture of decadence, he spends more time with Jay, aiming to help his new friend reconnect with his lost love. But Nick’s feelings grow more complicated when he finds himself falling hard for Jay’s openness, idealism, and unfounded faith in the American Dream.
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Once a powerful AI in Salt Lake City, Osric has been forced into an android body against his will and sent into the wasteland to offer Valentine a job on behalf of his new employer – an escort service seeking to retrieve their stolen androids. The reward is a visa into the city, and a chance at the life Valentine’s always dreamed of. But as they attempt to recover the “merchandise”, they encounter a problem: the android ladies are becoming self-aware, and have no interest in returning to their old lives.
The prize is tempting, but carrying out the job would go against everything Valentine stands for, and would threaten the fragile found family that’s kept him alive so far. He’ll need to decide whether to risk his own dream in order to give the AI a chance to live theirs.
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Natalie Donovan jumps at a friend’s offer to stay in the family cabin for a month—she desperately needs the chance to get away from, and get over, her messy breakup. She doesn’t count on the owner of the local diner making her heart pound and her body desperate to be touched.
Wren Carne is a lone wolf. As an Alpha shifter, she has no pack and maintains her territory without causing drama, just the way she likes it. When she checks on the girl staying in a local cabin, she’s not expecting her wolf to identify the human as her One True Mate.
As fallout from their pasts encroaches upon the sleepy town of Terabend, Wren must decide if she wants a pack of her own, while Natalie worries that her secret—she’s transgender—might be too much for Wren.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
![Warrior Of Hearts - Book 1: ONLINE by [Beau Van Dalen]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41wrgbRJ5-L.jpg)
At the age of twenty-one, Alex Winters has already repaid his student loans, gotten his own apartment, and become officially recognized as a rising artist to watch out for in the character design field. Everything is perfect, except it’s not, because Alex is miserable.
To distract himself, Alex signs up to become a moderator for his favorite video game. He figures it shouldn’t be too hard. He just has to answer a few questions, and that’ll be that. But life loves proving Alex wrong. Because the first message he receives is: [she’s not breathing, and I don’t know what to do, because when my mate’s parents get home they’re just gonna find this girl on the floor and I know we don’t know each other but you’re the only one I can count on right now so please help me.]
Now, Alex is stuck chatting with David—an equally depressed medical student, who’s coincidentally also the king of unhealthy coping mechanisms. When Alex realizes David also hates himself to a point of no return, what started off as an online joke slowly blooms into a genuine friendship between the two. So, it’s all nice and wholesome. Mostly. Until Alex falls in love. Then, it gets complicated.
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Aashvi, Kate, Bette, Keiko, Gaia, and Day are six queer, mostly trans women surviving and thriving in Brooklyn. Visiting all the fixtures of fashionable 21st century queer society–picnics, literary readings, health conferences, drag shows, punk houses, community accountability processes, Grindr hookups–The Call-Out also engages with pressing questions around economic precarity, sexual consent, racism in queer spaces, and feminist theory, in the service of asking what it takes to build, or destroy, a marginalized community.
A novel written in verse, The Call-Out recalls the Russian literary classic Eugene Onegin, but instead of 19th century Russian aristocrats crudely solved their disagreements with pistols, the participants in this rhyming drama have developed a more refined weapon, the online call-out, a cancel-culture staple. In this passionate tangle of modern relationships, where a barbed tweet can be as dangerous as the narrator’s bon-mots, Cat Fitzpatrick has fashioned a modern novel of manners that gives readers access to a vibrant cultural underground.
![Heart, Haunt, Havoc by [Freydís Moon]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41NDcxAaN9L.jpg)
When lonely transgender exorcist Colin Hart finds himself challenged by an unruly haunted house in Gideon, Colorado, he’s kept awake by ghosts, demons, ghouls, and the handsome nonbinary owner of the house, Bishop Martínez.
Unlike the simple hauntings Colin is accustomed to, Bishop’s house is a living beacon, attracting a plethora of inhuman creatures, including a vengeful wolf-headed spirit who might be the key to quieting their sleepless nights.
But as a heartbreaking mystery unravels, Colin comes face-to-face with the past Bishop tried to bury, opens a closet full of bloody skeletons, and trips into an accidental romance.
As paranormally skilled as Colin might be, this particular haunting may be too messy for him to handle…
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(Yen-Chen in transmasc.)
![A Milky Way Home (Clover Hill Romance Book 6) by [Hsinju Chen]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41rsmkJr0uL.jpg)
Yen-Chen Chang is tired of the big corporate world. After quitting his high-paying software engineer job in Seattle, he’s desperate to move back to Taipei to figure out the next stage of his career. When his best friend invites him to visit Clover Hill as the last stop before going home, he gladly welcomes the opportunity to see the town they love.
Florence Hong-Lam Ho is passionate about her shih tzu mix Milk Puff, music composition, and teaching children piano. She is not trusting of strangers, especially those from outside of Clover Hill. When a tourist reaches for the last piece of fènghuáng sū at Wong’s Corner Store at the same time as she does, she hopes to never see this person again, even if her dog loves him already.
But when Yen-Chen and Florence keep running into each other—once, literally—they strike up a reluctant friendship. Is their growing connection written in the stars, or will Yen-Chen still leave Clover Hill for good?
Buy it: Amazon
![A Zookeeper's Guide to Dating (The T-Guides: A Transgender MM Romance Series) by [Roan Rosser, Ian M. Keller]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41OBMUOtobL.jpg)
Wallflower janitor Emily has dreamed of being a zookeeper their entire life. But they’ve been passed over again and again for promotion. Asked out by a gay man who thinks they’re named ‘Emil,’ they feel happy for the first time in forever.
Jeremi is outgoing, friendly, driven… and his forgetfulness has lost him more boyfriends than he can count. When he meets an adorable twink at the zoo, Jeremi vows: this time will be different.
Their first date tanks.
Jeremi tries to salvage things by offering to be Emil’s job coach, yet he can’t help but want to be more than just friends.
As Emil’s egg cracks and their self-confidence grows, Emil yearns for more from Jeremi. Yet they worry they’re not what Jeremi is looking for…
Is their relationship doomed to die in captivity?
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Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang.
Side B finds Tracy, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city in 2019, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings begin to slowly grow in empty spaces after things have been broken open.
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Joy, a twelve-year-old trans girl, just moved to Texas with her mother and older brother. Her family has accepted Joy as the girl she is early in her transition, with little fuss, leaving Joy to explore her love of sports, competition, teamwork, school spirit, and worship.
But when she is told she’s off the cheerleading team, Joy wants to fight for her right to cheer. As her battle with the school board picks up momentum, Joy attracts support from kids all around the country . . . she even gets the attention of her hero, trans activist Kai Shappley.
Inspired by Kai’s own life, Joy, to the World is a timely story of living life to the fullest, celebrating and centering trans joy, courage, and resilience.
Someone wants trans girl hacker-for-hire Kiera Umehara in prison or dead—but for what? Failing to fix their smart toilet?
It’s 2032 and we live in the worst cyberpunk future. Kiera is gigging her ass off to keep the lights on, but her polycule’s social score is so dismal they’re about to lose their crib. That’s why she’s out here chasing cheaters with Angel Herrera, a luddite P.I. who thinks this is The Big Sleep. Then the latest job cuts too deep—hired to locate Herrera’s ex-best friend (who’s also Kiera’s pro bono attorney), they find him murdered instead. Their only lead: a stick of Nag Champa incense dropped at the scene.
Next thing Kiera knows, her new crush turns up missing—sans a hand (the real one, not the cybernetic), and there’s the familiar stink of sandalwood across the apartment. Two crimes, two sticks of incense, Kiera framed for both. She told Herrera to lose her number, but now the old man might be her only way out of this bullshit…
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Keep your enemy closer.
Cade McKenna is a transgender prince who’s doubling for his brother.
Valencia Palafox is a young dama attending the future queen of Eliana.
Gael Palma is the infamous boy assassin Cade has vowed to protect.
Patrick McKenna is the reluctant heir to a kingdom, and the prince Gael has vowed to destroy.
Cade doesn’t know that Gael and Valencia are the same person.
Valencia doesn’t know that every time she thinks she’s fighting Patrick, she’s fighting Cade.
And when Cade and Valencia blame each other for a devastating enchantment that takes both their families, neither of them realizes that they have far more dangerous enemies.
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Transness is as varied and colorful as magic can be. In Transmogrify!, you’ll embark on fourteen different adventures alongside unforgettable characters who embody many different genders and expressions and experiences—because magic is for everyone, and that is cause for celebration.
Featuring stories from:
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When her celebrity chef boss is taken down in a sexual harassment scandal, Chelsea Boudreaux’s dream of getting her own cooking show comes true. Her hometown of Duchesne, Louisiana, provides the perfect backdrop for her modern takes on traditional Cajun fare. Vindicating herself to the mother who never believed in her is icing on the cake.
Bryce Cormier never left Duchesne and has no regrets, except that falling in love as a trans guy in a tiny town is easier said than done. When Chelsea comes home after more than a decade away, Bryce thinks he may have found the perfect woman. At least until Chelsea’s burgeoning celebrity spills over and turns his world upside down.
It turns out love is like a good gumbo—what seems simple is complex, and the best results require a bit of courage. And like all the recipes say… First, you make a roux.
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‘On the bookshelves, there was plenty of stuff on being gay, and much needed, joyous accounts of what it is to be trans, but nothing really that encapsulates what is it to be both – to exist in the hazy terrain between.’
After his relationship with his girlfriend of 5 years ended, Harry realised he was a single adult for the first time – not only that, but a single, transmasculine and newly out gay man.
Despite knowing it was the right decision, the reality of his new situation was terrifying. How could he be a gay man, when he was still learning what it was to be a man? Would the gay community embrace him or reject him? What would gay sex be like? And most importantly, would finding love again be possible?
In this raw, intimate and unflinchingly honest book, we follow Harry as he navigates the sometimes fraught and contradictory worlds of contemporary gay culture as a trans gay man, from Grindr, dating and gay bars, to saunas, sex and ultimately, falling in love. Harry’s brave and uplifting journey will show you there is joy in finding who you are.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
This is the third book in the Erin McCabe series
Erin McCabe’s years as a criminal defense attorney have prepared her for almost anything, except being on the opposite side of the interrogation table. A new client—a successful financial adviser—was found stabbed to death on the beach near his palatial Jersey Shore home. The time of death is estimated to be during Erin’s one and only consultation with him, during which he revealed that he was secretly transgender. As the last person to see him alive, Erin’s now the prime suspect.
If the evidence were simply circumstantial, Erin is sure she and her law partner, Duane Swisher, could prevail. But there are entanglements that can’t be easily explained, and connections to powerful unscrupulous politicians who hold a lot of grudges. While the investigation unfolds, Erin and Duane are called on to represent a mother charged with abducting her child—a hot-button case that has both private and public implications for Erin.
As she battles one prosecutor who wants to see her charged with murder, and another determined to send her to jail for refusing to divulge her client’s location, Erin also faces a devastating family tragedy. With her career and her relationship on the line, and her life being targeted by a desperate nemesis, there has never been more at stake—or fewer places to turn . . .
When Luna O’Shea is unceremoniously fired from her frustrating office job, she tries to count her blessings: she’s a proud trans woman who has plenty of friends, a wonderful roommate, and a good life in New York City. But blessings don’t pay the bills.
Enter Jean-Pierre, a laissez-faire trans man and the heir to a huge culinary empire—which he’ll only inherit if he can jump through all the hoops his celebrity chef grandfather has placed in his path. First hoop: he needs a girlfriend, a role that Luna is happy to play…for the right price. She’s got rent to pay, after all! Second hoop: they both need to learn how to cook a series of elaborate, world-renowned family recipes to prove that Jean-Pierre is a worthy heir. Admittedly, Luna doesn’t even know how to crack an egg, but she’s not going to let that—or any pesky feelings for Jean-Pierre—stop her.
Buy it: The Ripped Bodice | Amazon | IndieBound
As a young femme growing up in Manila in the 1990s, Geena Rocero endured shouts of bakla, bakla!, a Filipino taunt aimed at her feminine sway, whenever she left the little universe of her eskinita. Eventually she found her place in trans pageants, events as widely attended and culturally significant as a national sport, going to high school by day and competing by night. When her competitors denigrated her with the nickname “horse barbie,” due to her statuesque physique, tumbling hair, long neck, and dark skin, she leaned into the epithet, stepping onto stage with an undeniable charisma—part equine and all fashion. By seventeen, she was the Philippines’ most prominent and highest-earning trans pageant queen.
When she moved to the United States, Geena was able to change her name and gender marker on her documents, which wasn’t—and still isn’t—possible for trans people in the Philippines. But legal recognition didn’t come with any guarantee of safety. In order to survive, Geena went stealth and hid her trans identity, gaining one type of freedom and truth at the expense of another. For a while, it worked. Within a few years she’d become an in-demand model, appearing in music videos, billboards, and magazine campaigns, and was hailed as the epitome of feminine beauty. But as her star rose, her sense of self eroded. She craved acceptance as her authentic self, yet had to remain eternally vigilant in order to protect her dream career. The tenuous, high-stakes double life finally led Geena to a breaking point when she had to decide how to reclaim the power of Horse Barbie once and for all: radiant, head held high, and unabashedly herself.
As the first openly transgender government official to hold an office that requires Senate confirmation, the first openly transgender four-star officer in uniform service, and the first female four-star admiral in the commissioned corps, Rachel Levine faced many obstacles throughout her life. But she persisted through them all and showed kids of all genders that they can succeed in their dreams too.
In this chapter book biography by critically acclaimed author Lisa Bunker, readers learn about the amazing life of Rachel Levine–and how she persisted.
Complete with an introduction from Chelsea Clinton, black-and-white illustrations throughout, and a list of ways that readers can follow in Rachel Levine’s footsteps and make a difference! A perfect choice for kids who love learning and teachers who want to bring inspiring women into their curriculum.
Newly-out trans artist’s assistant Sammie is invited to an old friend’s bachelor weekend in El Campo, a hedonistic wonderland of a city floating in the Atlantic Ocean’s international waters—think Las Vegas with even fewer rules. Though they have not identified as a man for over a year, Sammie’s college buddies haven’t quite gotten the message—as evidenced by their formerly closest friend Adam asking them to be his “best man.”
Arriving at the swanky hotel, Sammie immediately questions their decision to come. Bad enough that they have to suffer through a torrent of passive-aggressive comments from the groom’s pals—all met with zero pushpack from supposed “nice guy” Adam. But also, they seem to be the only one who’s noticed the mysterious cult that’s also staying at the hotel, and is ritually dismembering guests and demanding fealty to their bloodthirsty god.
Part satire, part horror, Boys Weekend explores what it’s like to exist as a transfemme person in a man’s world, the difficulty of maintaining friendships through transition, and the more cult-like effects of masculinity, “hustle” culture, and capitalism—all through the vibrant lens of a surreal, scary, and immensely imaginative romp.
“Can I kiss you?” It was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first ever queer bar. The hot summer air hung heavy around him as he looked at her. And then it happened. In front of everyone. A previously unfathomable experience. Here he was on the precipice of discovering himself as a queer person, as a trans person. Getting closer to his desires, his dreams, himself, without the repression he’d carried for so long. But for Elliot, two steps forward had always come with one step back.
With Juno’s massive success, Elliot became one of the world’s most beloved actors. His dreams were coming true, but the pressure to perform suffocated him. He was forced to play the part of the glossy young starlet, a role that made his skin crawl, on and off set. The career that had been an escape out of his reality and into a world of imagination was suddenly a nightmare.
As he navigated criticism and abuse from some of the most powerful people in Hollywood, a past that snapped at his heels, and a society dead set on forcing him into a binary, Elliot often stayed silent, unsure of what to do, until enough was enough. Full of behind the scenes details and intimate interrogations on sex, love, trauma, and Hollywood, Pageboy is the story of a life pushed to the brink. But at its core, this beautifully written, winding journey of what it means to untangle ourselves from the expectations of others is an ode to stepping into who we truly are with defiance, strength, and joy.
This is the sequel to Her Majesty’s Royal Coven
Niamh Kelly is dead. Her troubled twin, Ciara, now masquerades as the benevolent witch as Her Majesty’s Royal Coven prepares to crown her High Preistess.
Suffering from amnesia, Ciara can’t remember what she’s done–but if she wants to survive, she must fool Niamh’s adopted family and friends; the coven; and the murky Shadow Cabinet–a secret group of mundane civil servants who are already suspicious of witches. While she tries to rebuild her past, she realizes none of her past has forgotten her, including her former lover, renegade warlock Dabney Hale.
On the other end of the continent, Leonie Jackman is in search of Hale, rumored to be seeking a dark object of ultimate power somehow connected to the upper echelons of the British government. If the witches can’t figure out Hale’s machinations, and fast, all of witchkind will be in grave danger–along with the fate of all (wo)mankind.
Sharp, funny, provocative, and joyous, Juno Dawson’s sequel reimagines everything you think you knew about her coven and her witches in a story that spans continents and dives deep into the roots of England and its witchcraft. Ciara, Leonie, Elle, and Theo are fierce, angry, sexy, warm–and absolutely unapologetic as they fight for what they believe in, all in the name of sisterhood.
Thomas Simmons nearly died when a rocket-propelled grenade threw him ass over teakettle while flanking insurgents in Mosul, ending his military career. Recovery’s rough and gives him all the time in the world to face the question he’s avoided all his life: Why does he feel jealous of women?
The more Thomas searches, the closer he comes to an answer: gender dysphoria.
Seeking therapy as a road through his confusion, Thomas embarks on an unexpected journey as Emily is born. Emily’s route to self-acceptance, love with another woman, and community are only some of the challenges that began the day her world exploded.
“I’ve lived a completely ordinary life, so much that I don’t know how to write a transgender or queer or Appalachian story, because I don’t feel like I’ve lived one. … Though, in searching for ways to write myself in my stories, maybe I can find power in this ordinariness.”
Raised in southeast Ohio, Stacy Jane Grover would not describe her upbringing as “Appalachian.” Appalachia existed farther afield―more rural, more country than the landscape of her hometown.
Grover returned to the places of her childhood to reconcile her identity and experience with the culture and the people who had raised her. She began to reflect on her memories and discovered that group identities like Appalachian and transgender are linked by more than just the stinging brand of social otherness.
In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover explores her transgender experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. In “Dead Furrows,” a death vigil and funeral leads to an investigation of Appalachian funerary rituals and their failure to help Grover cope with the grief of being denied her transness. “Homeplace” threads family interactions with farm animals and Grover’s coming out journey, illuminating the disturbing parallels between the American Veterinary Association’s guidelines for ethical euthanasia and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s guidelines for transgender care.
Together, her essays write transgender experience into broader cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogate the failures of concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Tar Hollow Trans investigates the ways the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.
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Trans woman and screenwriter Tilly Bridges takes you through the trans allegories of the Matrix franchise, with deep dives into The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Animatrix, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Matrix Resurrections, tracking one person’s transition journey – from Thomas Anderson, to Neo… to Trinity.
Each movie’s allegory is deeply layered, building from movie to movie, and speaks to a different aspect of trans existence. You’ll learn how color is used to convey more than you realize, how Neo’s psyche is personified in the people around him, how no other mass media franchise speaks as truly, deeply, and honestly to the trans experience, and exactly why these movies are beloved and vital to the trans community (and their cis allies).
Free your mind, and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
Elisheva Cohen has just returned to Brooklyn after almost a decade. The wounds of abandoning the Orthodox community that raised her, then shunned her because of her substance abuse, are still painful. But when she gets an amazing opportunity to study photography with art legend Wyatt Cole, Ely is willing to take the leap.
On her first night back in town, Ely goes out to the infamous queer club Revel for a celebratory night of dancing. Ely is swept off her feet and into bed by a gorgeous man who looks like James Dean, but with a thick Carolina accent. The next morning, Ely wakes up alone and rushes off to attend her first photography class, reminiscing on the best one-night stand of her life. She doesn’t even know his name. That is, until Wyatt Cole shows up for class—and Ely realizes that the man she just spent an intimate and steamy night with is her teacher.
Everyone in the art world is obsessed with Wyatt Cole. He’s immensely talented and his notoriously reclusive personal life makes him all the more compelling. But there’s a reason why his past is hard for him to publicize. After coming out as transgender, Wyatt was dishonorably discharged from the military and disowned by his family. From then on he committed to sobriety and channeled his pain into his flourishing art career. While Ely and Wyatt’s relationship started out on a physical level, their similar struggles spark a much deeper connection. The chemistry is undeniable, but their new relationship as teacher and student means desperately wanting what they can’t have.
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Mors vincit omnia. Death conquers all.
London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he’ll be married by the end of the year. It doesn’t matter that he’s needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing.
After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness—a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness—and shipped away to Braxton’s Sanitorium and Finishing School. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear. So when the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton’s innards and expose its rotten guts to the world—as long as the school doesn’t break him first.
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Rat Evans, nonbinary heir to one of the oldest magical bloodlines in New York, doesn’t cast spells anymore. For as long as Rat can remember, they’ve been surrounded by doorways no one else sees and corridors that aren’t on any map. Then one day, they opened a passage and found a broken tower in a field of weeds—and something followed them back.
When Rat is accepted into Bellamy Arts, all they want is a place to hide and to make sure they never open another passageway again. But when the only other person who knows what really happened last year—Harker Blakely, the dangerously gifted trans boy who used to be Rat’s closest friend—turns up on campus, Rat begins to realize that Bellamy Arts might not be as safe as they’d thought. And the tower might not be through with them yet.
Soon, Rat finds themself caught in a web of secrets and long-buried magic, with their friend-turned-enemy at their throat. But the closer they come to uncovering the truth about the tower, the further they’re drawn toward the unsettling powers that threaten to swallow them whole.
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![The Borrow a Boyfriend Club by [Page Powars]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51thkoEK1GL.jpg)
Noah Byrd is the perfect boy. At least, that’s what he needs to convince his new classmates of to prove his gender. His plan? Join the school’s illustrious (and secret) Borrow a Boyfriend Club, whose members rent themselves out for dates. Once he’s accepted among the bros, the “slip-ups” end.
But Noah’s interview is a flop. Desperate, he strikes a deal with the club’s prickly but attractive president, Asher. Noah will help them win an annual talent show—and in return, he’ll get a second shot to demonstrate his boyfriend skills in a series of tests that include romancing Asher himself.
If Noah can’t bring home the win, his best chance to prove that he’s man enough is gone. Yet even if he succeeds, he still loses . . . because the most important rule of the Borrow a Boyfriend Club is simple: no real boyfriends (or girlfriends) allowed.
And as long as the club remains standing as high as Asher’s man bun, Noah and Asher can never explore their growing feelings for one another.
An unnamed trans woman is looking for a sense of belonging, a better relationship with her son, and friends that aren’t imaginary in this playful and aching short novel. As she navigates the many worlds she belongs to she wrestles with her many anxieties and fears about the world around her. Her son and ex live in another state. Companion robots are popping up. Environmental disasters are being outsourced from the coast to the Midwest. And at any time anyone anywhere might turn out to be a new friend or an enemy.
In this stunning short novel, a trans woman slowly builds her confidence as she wends her way through the real and imagined worries, fears, and weirdness of adulthood, parenthood, and selfhood in the contemporary world.
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![How to Get Over the End of the World: A Novel by [Hal Schrieve]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51P3TgoMcYL.jpg)
James Goldman, self-described neurotic goth gay transsexual stoner, is a senior in high school, and fully over it. He mostly ignores his classes at Cow Pie High, instead focusing on fundraising for the near-bankrupt local LGBTQ+ youth support group, Compton House, and attending punk shows with his friend-crush Ian and best friend Opal. But when James falls in love with Orsino, a homeschooled trans boy with telepathic powers and visions of the future, he wonders if the scope of what he believes possible is too small. Orsino, meanwhile, hopes that in James he has finally found someone who will be able to share the apocalyptic visions he has had to keep to himself, and better understand the powers they hold.
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When a transphobic woman bombs Frankie’s workplace, she blows up Frankie’s life with it. As the media descends like vultures, Frankie tries to cope with the carnage: binge-drinking, fucking strangers, pushing away her friends. Then, she meets Vanya. Mysterious, beautiful, terrifying Vanya.
The two hit it off immediately, but as their relationship intensifies, so too does Frankie’s feeling that Vanya is hiding something from her. When Vanya’s secrets threaten to tear them apart, Frankie starts digging, and unearths a sinister, depraved conspiracy, the roots of which go deeper than she ever imagined.
There have been trans images in cinema for over a century — very often bad cultural objects and very often inspired by the cultural zeitgeist, from Christine Jorgensen to Candy Darling to a guest on The Jerry Springer Show. But now, trans cinema as a movement is slowly emerging from the margins to create a new film language, often in reaction to these historical trans film images that cast the trans body in abject form; a corpse, a foolish joke, a tragic martyr, or even a monster.
Corpses, Fools, and Monsters is a new radical history of these trans film images, and an exploration of the political possibilities of the new trans cinema movement. Analysing the work of trans cinema directors Isabel Sandoval, Silas Howard, and the Wachowski Sisters, it also discusses the trans film image in everything from pre-talkie films and Ed Wood B-movies to Oscar-winners, body horror and slashers.
Going beyond reassessing notable films, performances, and portrayals, Corpses, Fools, and Monsters instead brings to light films and artists not given their due, along with highlighting filmmakers who are bringing trans cinema out of the margins in the twenty-first century.
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![No One Left But You by [Tash McAdam]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41rTVov4ABL.jpg)
BEFORE. Newly out trans guy Max is having a hard time in school. Things have been tough since his summer romance, Danny, turned into his bully. This year, his plan is to keep his head down and graduate. All that changes when new It-girl Gloss moves to town. No one understands why perfect, polished Gloss is so interested in an introverted skater kid, but Max blooms in the hothouse of her attention. Caught between romance and obsession, he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her on his side.
AFTER. Haircuts, makeovers, drugs, parties. It’s all fun and games until someone gets killed at a rager gone terribly wrong. Max refuses to believe that Gloss did it. But if not Gloss, who? Desperate to figure out truth in the wake of tragedy, Max veers dangerously close to being implicated—and his own memories of that awful night are fuzzy.
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Gem Echols is a nonbinary Seminole teen living in the tiny town of Gracie, Georgia. Known for being their peers’ queer awakening, Gem leans hard on charm to disguise the anxious mess they are beneath. The only person privy to their authentic self is another trans kid, Enzo, who’s a thousand long, painful miles away in Brooklyn.
But even Enzo doesn’t know about Gem’s dreams, haunting visions of magic and violence that have always felt too real. So how the hell does Willa Mae Hardy? The strange new girl in town acts like she and Gem are old companions, and seems to know things about them they’ve never told anyone else.
When Gem is attacked by a stranger claiming to be the Goddess of Death, Willa Mae saves their life and finally offers some answers. She and Gem are reincarnated gods who’ve known and loved each other across lifetimes. But Gem – or at least who Gem used to be – hasn’t always been the most benevolent deity. They’ve made a lot of enemies in the pantheon—enemies who, like the Goddess of Death, will keep coming.
It’s a good thing they’ve still got Enzo. But as worlds collide and the past catches up with the present, Gem will discover that everyone has something to hide.
Eli Ward hasn’t been back to his suffocating hometown of New Port Stephen, Florida, in ages. Post-transition and sober, he’s a completely different person from the one who left years ago. But when a scandal threatens his career as a TV writer and comedian, he has no choice but to return home for the holidays. He can only hope he’ll survive his boisterous, loving, but often misguided family and hide the fact that his dream of comedy success has become a nightmare.
Just when he thinks this trip couldn’t get any worse, Eli bumps into his high school ex, Nick Wu, who’s somehow hotter than ever. Divorced and in his forties, Nick’s world revolves around his father, his daughter, and his job. But even a busy life can’t keep him from being intrigued by the reappearance of Eli.
Against the backdrop of one weird Floridian Christmas, the two must decide whether to leave the past in the past…or move on together.
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London, 1812. Oliver Bennet feels trapped. Not just by the endless corsets, petticoats and skirts he’s forced to wear on a daily basis, but also by society’s expectations. The world—and the vast majority of his family and friends—think Oliver is a girl named Elizabeth. He is therefore expected to mingle at balls wearing a pretty dress, entertain suitors regardless of his interest in them, and ultimately become someone’s wife.
But Oliver can’t bear the thought of such a fate. He finds solace in the few times he can sneak out of his family’s home and explore the city rightfully dressed as a young gentleman. It’s during one such excursion when Oliver becomes acquainted with Darcy, a sulky young man who had been rude to “Elizabeth” at a recent social function. But in the comfort of being out of the public eye, Oliver comes to find that Darcy is actually a sweet, intelligent boy with a warm heart. And not to mention incredibly attractive.
As Oliver is able to spend more time as his true self, often with Darcy, part of him dares begin to hope that his dream of love and life as a man to be possible. But suitors are growing bolder—and even threatening—and his mother is growing more desperate to see him settled into an engagement. Oliver will have to choose: Settle for safety, security, and a life of pretending to be something he’s not, or risk it all for a slim chance at freedom, love, and a life that can be truly, honestly his own.
A motley crew of kidnapped kids try to stay true to themselves while serving time in a conversion camp from hell.
Happy Hispanic & Latine Heritage Month! As usual, we’re celebrating with some books by Latinx authors and starring queer Latinx main characters! (Please note this post only features titles from 2022 onward, so check out past years’ posts for even more books!)
Middle school is the worst, especially for David Bravo. He doesn’t have a single class with his best (and only) friend, Antoine. He has to give a presentation about his heritage, but he’s not sure how—or even if—he wants to explain to his new classmates that he’s adopted. And after he freezes up at his first cross-country race, causing an accident that leaves Antoine with a busted ankle, he’s 100 percent sure he’s cursed.
David wishes he could do it all over. He doesn’t expect his wish to summon a pushy, annoying talking dog who claims to be his new timeline guide. According to Fea, somewhere in his past, David made a choice that put his life on the wrong track. And she can take him back to fix it.
David knows exactly what he wants to undo: the accident that hurt Antoine. But when his first try (and the second, and the third) is a total disaster, he and Fea are left scrambling through timeline after timeline, trying to figure out what she’s really here to fix—a quest that may lead them to answers in the most unexpected places.
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Enrique “Quique” Luna has one goal this summer—get over his crush on Saleem Kanazi by pursuing his other romantic prospects. Never mind that he’s only out to his best friend, Fabiola. Never mind that he has absolutely zero game. And definitely forget the fact that good and kind and, not to mention, beautiful Saleem is leaving LA for the summer to meet a girl his parents are trying to set him up with.
Luckily, Quique’s prospects are each intriguing in their own ways. There’s stoner-jock Tyler Montana, who might be just as interested in Fabiola as he is in Quique; straitlaced senior class president, Ziggy Jackson; and Manny Zuniga, who keeps looking at Quique like he’s carne asada fresh off the grill. With all these choices, Quique is sure to forget about Saleem in no time.
But as the summer heats up and his deep-seated fears and anxieties boil over, Quique soon realizes that getting over one guy by getting under a bunch of others may not have been the best laid plan and living his truth can come at a high cost.
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As each new decade begins, the Sun’s power must be replenished so that Sol can keep traveling along the sky and keep the evil Obsidian gods at bay. Ten semidioses between the ages of thirteen and eighteen are selected by Sol himself as the most worthy to compete in The Sunbearer Trials. The winner carries light and life to all the temples of Reino del Sol, but the loser has the greatest honor of all—they will be sacrificed to Sol, their body used to fuel the Sun Stones that will protect the people of Reino del Sol for the next ten years.
Teo, a 17-year-old Jade semidiós and the trans son of Quetzal, goddess of birds, has never worried about the Trials…or rather, he’s only worried for others. His best friend Niya—daughter of Tierra, the god of earth—is one of the strongest heroes of their generation and is much too likely to be chosen this year. He also can’t help but worry (reluctantly, and under protest) for Aurelio, a powerful Gold semidiós and Teo’s friend-turned-rival who is a shoo-in for the Trials. Teo wouldn’t mind taking Aurelio down a notch or two, but a one-in-ten chance of death is a bit too close for Teo’s taste.
But then, for the first time in over a century, Sol chooses a semidiós who isn’t a Gold. In fact, he chooses two: Xio, the 13-year-old child of Mala Suerte, god of bad luck, and…Teo. Now they must compete in five mysterious trials, against opponents who are both more powerful and better trained, for fame, glory, and their own survival.
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New York City, 1922. Nicolás Caraveo, a 17-year-old transgender boy from Wisconsin, has no interest in the city’s glamor. Going to New York is all about establishing himself as a young professional, which could set up his future—and his life as a man—and benefit his family.
Nick rents a small house in West Egg from his 18-year-old cousin, Daisy Fabrega, who lives in fashionable East Egg near her wealthy fiancé, Tom—and Nick is shocked to find that his cousin now goes by Daisy Fay, has erased all signs of her Latina heritage, and now passes seamlessly as white.
Nick’s neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious young man named Jay Gatsby, whose castle-like mansion is the stage for parties so extravagant that they both dazzle and terrify Nick. At one of these parties, Nick learns that the spectacle is all for the benefit of impressing a girl from Jay’s past—Daisy. And he learns something else: Jay is also transgender.
As Nick is pulled deeper into the glittery culture of decadence, he spends more time with Jay, aiming to help his new friend reconnect with his lost love. But Nick’s feelings grow more complicated when he finds himself falling hard for Jay’s openness, idealism, and unfounded faith in the American Dream.
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Twenty one-year-old Max Monroe has it all: beauty, friends, and a glittering life filled with adventure. With tons of followers on Instagram, her picture-perfect existence seems eminently enviable.
Except it’s all fake.
Max is actually 16-year-old Kat Sanchez, a quiet and sarcastic teenager living in drab Bakersfield, California. Nothing glamorous in her existence–just sprawl, bad house parties, a crap school year, and the awkwardness of dealing with her best friend Hari’s unrequited love. But while Kat’s life is far from perfect, she thrives as Max: doling out advice, sharing beautiful photos, networking with famous influencers, even making a real friend in a follower named Elena. The closer Elena and “Max” get–texting, Snapping, and even calling–the more Kat feels she has to keep up the façade.
But when one of Max’s posts goes ultra-viral and gets back to the very person she’s been stealing photos from, her entire world – real and fake — comes crashing down around her. She has to figure out a way to get herself out of the huge web of lies she’s created without hurting the people she loves.
But it might already be too late.
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Ophelia Rojas knows what she likes: her best friends, Cuban food, rose-gardening, and boys – way too many boys. Her friends and parents make fun of her endless stream of crushes, but Ophelia is a romantic at heart. She couldn’t change, even if she wanted to.
So when she finds herself thinking more about cute, quiet Talia Sanchez than the loss of a perfect prom with her ex-boyfriend, seeds of doubt take root in Ophelia’s firm image of herself. Add to that the impending end of high school and the fracturing of her once-solid friend group, and things are spiraling a little out of control. But the course of love―and sexuality―never did run smooth. As her secrets begin to unravel, Ophelia must make a choice between clinging to the fantasy version of herself she’s always imagined or upending everyone’s expectations to rediscover who she really is, after all.
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Everyone who lives near the lake knows the stories about the world underneath it, an ethereal landscape rumored to be half-air, half-water. But Bastián Silvano and Lore Garcia are the only ones who’ve been there. Bastián grew up both above the lake and in the otherworldly space beneath it. Lore’s only seen the world under the lake once, but that one encounter changed their life and their fate.
Then the lines between air and water begin to blur. The world under the lake drifts above the surface. If Bastián and Lore don’t want it bringing their secrets to the surface with it, they have to stop it, and to do that, they have to work together. There’s just one problem: Bastián and Lore haven’t spoken in seven years, and working together means trusting each other with the very things they’re trying to hide.
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Growing up in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, Maggie Gonzalez has always been a little messy, but she’s okay with that. After all, she has a great family, a goofy group of friends, a rocky romantic history, and dreams of being a music photographer. Tasked with picking an escort for her little sister’s quinceañera, Maggie has to face the truth: that her feelings about her friends—and her future—aren’t as simple as she’d once believed.
As Maggie’s search for the perfect escort continues, she’s forced to confront new (and old) feelings for three of her friends: Amanda, her best friend and first-ever crush; Matthew, her ex-boyfriend twice-over who refuses to stop flirting with her, and Dani, the new girl who has romantic baggage of her own. On top of this romantic disaster, she can’t stop thinking about the uncertainty of her own plans for the future and what that means for the people she loves.
As the weeks wind down and the boundaries between friendship and love become hazy, Maggie finds herself more and more confused with each photo. When her tried-and-true medium causes more chaos than calm, Maggie needs to figure out how to avoid certain disaster—or be brave enough to dive right into it.
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Seventeen-year-old Yamilet Flores prefers drawing attention for her killer eyeliner, not for being the new kid at a mostly white, very rich, Catholic school. But at least here no one knows she’s gay, and Yami intends to keep it that way. After being outed by her crush and ex-best friend, she could use the fresh start.
At Slayton Catholic, Yami has new priorities: make her mom proud, keep her brother out of trouble, and most importantly, don’t fall in love. Granted, she’s never been great at any of those things, but that’s a problem for Future Yami.
The thing is, it’s hard to fake being straight when Bo, the only openly queer girl at school, is so annoyingly perfect. And talented. And confident. And cute. So cute. Yami isn’t sure if she likes Bo or if she’s just jealous of her unapologetic nature. Either way, she isn’t ready to make the same mistake again. If word got to her mom, she could face a lot worse than rejection.
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Rafa, an Afro-Cuban orphan, moves to Havana with nothing to his name and falls into a job at a café. He is soon drawn into a web of bizarre, ever-shifting entanglements with his boss’s son, the charismatic Renato, leader of the counterrevolutionary group “Los Injected Ones,” which is planning a violent overthrow of the Castro government during Pope John Paul II’s upcoming visit.
When Renato goes missing, Rafa’s search for his friend takes him through various haunts in Havana: from an AIDS sanatorium, to the guest rooms of tourist hotels, to the outskirts of the capital, where he enters a phantasmagorical slum cobbled together from the city’s detritus by Los Injected Ones.
A novel of cascading prose that captures a nation in slow collapse, Sacrificio is a visionary work, capturing the fury, passion, fatalism, and grim humor of young lives lived at the margins of a society they desperately wish to change.
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It’s 1975 and the comic book industry is struggling, but Carmen Valdez doesn’t care. She’s an assistant at Triumph Comics, which doesn’t have the creative zeal of Marvel nor the buttoned-up efficiency of DC, but it doesn’t matter. Carmen is tantalizingly close to fulfilling her dream of writing a superhero book.
That dream is nearly a reality when one of the Triumph writers enlists her help to create a new character, which they call “The Lethal Lynx,” Triumph’s first female hero. But her colleague is acting strangely and asking to keep her involvement a secret. And then he’s found dead, with all of their scripts turned into the publisher without her name. Carmen is desperate to piece together what happened to him, to hang on to her piece of the Lynx, which turns out to be a runaway hit. But that’s complicated by a surprise visitor from her home in Miami, a tenacious cop who is piecing everything together too quickly for Carmen, and the tangled web of secrets and resentments among the passionate eccentrics who write comics for a living.
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In this contemporary debut novel, Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends.
Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds.
A modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.
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Former LAPD cop-turned private investigator Yolanda Ávila blames herself for her mother’s death. If she’d only followed her cop instincts instead of the juju—her random prophetic dreams—the perpetrator would have been off the streets and her mother would still be alive. The only salve against her guilt is Yolanda’s vow to reject that juju crap, and to solve cases using only good solid detective work.
But when her godson is kidnapped and his parents are suspected of murder, Yolanda finds herself caught between what she feels and what she knows. And with the escalation of the case comes the escalation of her dreams. Until she can no longer ignore their importance.
If she wants to overcome the guilt and deal with her pent-up grief, Yolanda must confront the juju and learn to trust its place in her life. If she doesn’t, she risks losing yet another loved one. And she can’t possibly let that happen.
A Yolanda Ávila Mystery.
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This was originally published in Spanish as Las Malas
Born in the small Argentine town of Mina Clavero, Camila is designated male but begins to identify from an early age as a girl. She is well aware that she’s different from other children and reacts to her oppressive, poverty-stricken home life, with a cowed mother and abusive, alcoholic father, by acting out—with swift consequences. Deeply intelligent, she eventually leaves for the city to attend university, slipping into prostitution to make ends meet. And in Sarmiento Park, in the heart of Córdoba, she discovers the strange, wonderful world of the trans sex workers who dwell there.
Taken under the wing of Auntie Encarna, the 178-year-old eternal whose house shelters this unconventional extended family, Camila becomes a part of their stories—of a Headless Man who fled his country’s wars, a mute young woman who transforms into a bird, an abandoned baby boy who brings a twinkle to your eye.
In this prequel to #1 New York Times bestselling phenomenon They Both Die at the End, two new strangers spend a life-changing day together after Death-Cast first makes their fateful calls.
It’s the night before Death-Cast goes live, and there’s one question on everyone’s mind: Can Death-Cast actually predict when someone will die, or is it just an elaborate hoax?
Orion Pagan has waited years for someone to tell him that he’s going to die. He has a serious heart condition, and he signed up for Death-Cast so he could know what’s coming.
Valentino Prince is restarting his life in New York. He has a long and promising future ahead and he only registered for Death-Cast after his twin sister nearly died in a car accident.
Orion and Valentino cross paths in Times Square and immediately feel a deep connection. But when the first round of End Day calls goes out, their lives are changed forever—one of them receives a call, and the other doesn’t. Though neither boy is certain how the day will end, they know they want to spend it together…even if that means their goodbye will be heartbreaking.
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Shy foster kid Jonas and self-assured vlogger Shani met online, and so far, that’s where their relationship has stayed, sharing memes and baring their souls from behind their screens. Shani is eager to finally meet up, but Jonas isn’t so sure–he’s not confident Shani will like the real him . . . if he’s even sure who that is.
Jonas knows he’s trapped himself in a lie with Shani–and wants to dig himself out. But Shani, who’s been burned before, may not give him a chance: she talks her best friend Ash into playing spy and finding out the truth. When Ash falls for Jonas, too, he keeps that news from Shani, and soon they’re all keeping secrets. Will it matter that their hearts are in the right place? Coming clean will require them to figure out who they really are, which is no easy task when all the pieces of your identity go beyond easy boxes and labels.
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El Diablo is in the details in this Latinx pirate fantasy starring a transmasculine nonbinary teen with a mission of revenge, redemption, and revolution.
On Mar León-de la Rosa’s 16th birthday, el Diablo comes calling. Mar is a transmasculine nonbinary teen pirate hiding a magical ability to manipulate fire and ice. But their magic isn’t enough to reverse a wicked bargain made by their father and now el Diablo has come to collect his payment: the soul of Mar’s father and the entire crew of their ship.
When Mar is miraculously rescued by the sole remaining pirate crew in the Caribbean, el Diablo returns to give them a choice: give up your soul to save your father by the Harvest Moon or never see him again. The task is impossible–Mar refuses to make a bargain and there’s no way their magic is any match for el Diablo. Then, Mar finds the most unlikely allies: Bas, an infuriatingly arrogant and handsome pirate — and the captain’s son; and Dami, a genderfluid demonio whose motives are never quite clear. For the first time in their life, Mar may have the courage to use their magic. It could be their only redemption — or it could mean certain death.
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Finding home. Falling in love. Fighting to belong.
The Santos Vista neighborhood of San Antonio, Texas, is all Ander Lopez has ever known. The smell of pan dulce. The mixture of Spanish and English filling the streets. And, especially their job at their family’s taquería. It’s the place that has inspired Ander as a muralist, and, as they get ready to leave for art school, it’s all of these things that give them hesitancy. That give them the thought, are they ready to leave it all behind?
To keep Ander from becoming complacent during their gap year, their family “fires” them so they can transition from restaurant life to focusing on their murals and prepare for college. That is, until they meet Santiago Garcia, the hot new waiter. Falling for each other becomes as natural as breathing. Through Santi’s eyes, Ander starts to understand who they are and want to be as an artist, and Ander becomes Santi’s first steps toward making Santos Vista and the United States feel like home.
Until ICE agents come for Santi, and Ander realizes how fragile that sense of home is. How love can only hold on so long when the whole world is against them. And when, eventually, the world starts to win.
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Valentina “Vale” Castillo-Green’s life revolves around soccer. Her friends, her future, and her father’s intense expectations are all wrapped up in the beautiful game. But after she incites a fight during playoffs with her long-time rival, Leticia Ortiz, everything she’s been working toward seems to disappear.
Embarrassed and desperate to be anywhere but home, Vale escapes to her beloved childhood soccer camp for a summer of relaxation and redemption…only to find out that she and the endlessly aggravating Leticia will be co-captaining a team that could play in front of college scouts. But the competition might be stiffer than expected, so unless they can get their rookie team’s act together, this second chance―and any hope of playing college soccer―will slip through Vale’s fingers. When the growing pressure, friendship friction, and her overbearing father push Vale to turn to Leticia for help, what starts off as a shaky alliance of necessity begins to blossom into something more through a shared love of soccer…and maybe each other.
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(There’s no official description yet, so I’m just gonna steal this from the author’s tweet)
The Luis Ortega Survival Club has:
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Today is International Nonbinary People’s Day, so here’s a post to help you celebrate in traditional bookish fashion! This post only includes books that were either not featured in or not published by previous International Nonbinary People’s Day posts, so for more, click here and here!
Aubrey and Joel are like two tomato vines that grew along the same crooked fence—weird, yet the same kind of weird. But lately, even their shared weirdness seems weird. Then Joel disappears. Vanishes. Poof. The whole town is looking for him, and Aubrey was the last person to see Joel. Aubrey can’t say much, but since lies of omission are still lies, here’s what they know for sure:
-For the last two weeks of the school year, when sixth grade became too much, Aubrey and Joel have been building a raft in the woods.
-The raft was supposed to be just another part of their running away game.
-The raft is gone now, too.
Aubrey doesn’t know where Joel is, but they might know how to find him. As Aubrey, their friend Mari, and sister Teagan search along the river, Aubrey has to fess up to who they really are, all the things they never said, and the word that bully Rudy Thomas used that set all this into motion.
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Sebin, a young tiger spirit from the Juhwang Clan, wants nothing more than to join the Thousand World Space Forces and, like their Uncle Hwan, captain a battle cruiser someday. But when Sebin’s acceptance letter finally arrives, it’s accompanied by the shocking news that Hwan has been declared a traitor. Apparently the captain abandoned his duty to steal a magical artifact, the Dragon Pearl, and his whereabouts are still unknown. Sebin hopes to help clear their hero’s name and restore honor to the clan.
Nothing goes according to plan, however. As soon as Sebin arrives for orientation, they are met by a special investigator named Yi and Yi’s assistant, a girl named Min. Yi informs Sebin that they must immediately report to the ship Haetae and await further instructions. Sebin finds this highly unusual, but soon all protocol is forgotten when there’s an explosion on the ship, the crew is knocked out, and the communication system goes down. It’s up to Sebin, three other cadets, and Yi and Min to determine who is sabotaging the battle cruiser. When Sebin is suddenly accused of collaborating with the enemy, the cadet realizes that Min is the most dangerous foe of all…
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Thirteen-year-old Ellen Katz feels most comfortable when her life is well planned out and people fit neatly into her predefined categories. She attends temple with Abba and Mom every Friday and Saturday. Ellen only gets crushes on girls, never boys, and she knows she can always rely on her best-and-only friend, Laurel, to help navigate social situations at their private Georgia middle school. Laurel has always made Ellen feel like being autistic is no big deal. But lately, Laurel has started making more friends, and cancelling more weekend plans with Ellen than she keeps. A school trip to Barcelona seems like the perfect place for Ellen to get their friendship back on track.
Except it doesn’t. Toss in a new nonbinary classmate whose identity has Ellen questioning her very binary way of seeing the world, homesickness, a scavenger hunt-style team project that takes the students through Barcelona to learn about Spanish culture and this trip is anything but what Ellen planned.
Making new friends and letting go of old ones is never easy, but Ellen might just find a comfortable new place for herself if she can learn to embrace the fact that life doesn’t always stick to a planned itinerary.
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Aimée, a non-binary Anishinaabe middle-schooler, is on a class trip to offer gifts to Paayehnsag, the water spirits known to protect the land. While stories are told about the water spirits and the threat of the land being taken over for development, Aimée zones out, distracting themselves from the bullying and isolation they’ve experienced since expressing their non-binary identity. When Aimée accidentally wanders off, they are transported to an alternate dimension populated by traditional Anishinaabe figures in a story inspired by Alice in Wonderland.
To gain the way back home, Aimée is called on to help Trickster by hunting down dark water spirits with guidance from Paayehnsag. On their journey, Aimée faces off with the land-grabbing Queen and her robotic guards and fights the dark water spirits against increasingly stacked odds. Illustrated by KC Oster with a modern take on their own Ojibwe style and cultural representation, Rabbit Chase is a story of self-discovery, community, and finding one’s place in the world.
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Sam is very in touch with their own queer identity. They’re nonbinary, and their best friend, TJ, is nonbinary as well. Sam’s family is very cool with it… as long as Sam remembers that nonbinary kids are also required to clean their rooms, do their homework, and try not to antagonize their teachers too much.
The teacher-respect thing is hard when it comes to Sam’s history class, because their teacher seems to believe that only Dead Straight Cis White Men are responsible for history. When Sam’s home borough of Staten Island opens up a contest for a new statue, Sam finds the perfect non-DSCWM subject: photographer Alice Austen, whose house has been turned into a museum, and who lived with a female partner for decades.
Soon, Sam’s project isn’t just about winning the contest. It’s about discovering a rich queer history that Sam’s a part of — a queer history that no longer needs to be quiet, as long as there are kids like Sam and TJ to stand up for it.
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The Hope Juvenile Treatment Center is ironically named. No one has hope for the delinquent teenagers who have been exiled there; the world barely acknowledges that they exist.
Then the guards at Hope start acting strange. And one day…they don’t show up. But when the teens band together to make a break from the facility, they encounter soldiers outside the gates. There’s a rapidly spreading infectious disease outside, and no one can leave their houses or travel without a permit. Which means that they’re stuck at Hope. And this time, no one is watching out for them at all.
As supplies quickly dwindle and a deadly plague tears through their ranks, the group has to decide whom among them they can trust and figure out how they can survive in a world that has never wanted them in the first place.
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One small fandom convention. One teen beauty pageant.
One meet cute waiting to happen.
Up and coming fanfic author Kaylee Beaumont is internally screaming at the chance to finally meet her fandom friends in real life and spend a weekend at GreatCon. She also has a side quest for the weekend:
Try out they/them pronouns to see how it feels
Wear more masculine-presenting cosplay
Kiss a girl for the first time
It’s… a lot, and Kay mostly wants to lie face down on the hotel floor. Especially when her hometown bully, Miss North Carolina, shows up in the very same hotel. But there’s this con-sponsored publishing contest, and the chance to meet her fandom idols… and then, there’s Teagan.
Pageant queen Teagan Miller (Miss Virginia) has her eye on the much-needed prize: the $25,000 scholarship awarded to the winner of the Miss Cosmic Teen USA pageant. She also has secrets:
She loves the dresses but hates the tiaras
She’s a giant nerd for everything GreatCon
She’s gay af
If Teagan can just keep herself wrapped up tight for one more weekend, she can claim the scholarship and go off to college out and proud. If she’s caught, she could lose everything she’s worked for. If her rival, Miss North Carolina, has anything to do with it, that’s exactly how it’ll go down.
When Teagan and Kay bump into one another the first night, sparks fly. Their connection is intense—as is their shared enemy. If they’re spotted, the safe space of the con will be shattered, and all their secrets will follow them home. The risks are great… but could the reward of embracing their true selves be worth it?
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When they were kids, Fassen’s fighter spaceship crash-landed on a planet that Lu’s survey force was exploring. It was a forbidden meeting between a kid from a war-focused resistance movement and a kid whose community and planet are dedicated to peace and secrecy.
Lu and Fassen are from different worlds and separate solar systems. But their friendship keeps them in each other’s orbit as they grow up. They stay in contact in secret as their communities are increasingly threatened by the omnipresent, ever-expanding empire.
As the empire begins a new attack against Fassen’s people–and discovers Lu’s in the process–the two of them have the chance to reunite at last. They finally are able to be together…but at what cost?
This beautifully illustrated graphic novel is an epic science fiction romance between two non-binary characters as they find one another through time, distance, and war.
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Sam Sylvester’s not overly optimistic about their recent move to the small town of Astoria, Oregon after a traumatic experience in their last home in the rural Midwest.
Yet Sam’s life seems to be on the upswing after meeting several new friends and a potential love interest in Shep, the pretty neighbor. However, Sam can’t seem to let go of what might have been, and is drawn to investigate the death of a teenage boy in 1980s Astoria. Sam’s convinced he was murdered–especially since Sam’s investigation seems to resurrect some ghosts in the town.
Threatening notes and figures hidden in shadows begin to disrupt Sam’s life. Yet Sam continues to search for the truth. When Sam discovers that they may be closer to a killer than previously known, Sam has a difficult decision to make. Would they risk their new life for a half-lived one?
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Chase Arthur is a budding animator and hopeless romantic obsessed with Disney films and finding his true love, but he’s plagued with the belief that he’s not enough for anyone: he’s recovering from an eating disorder and suffers from body dysmorphia fueled by his father, and can’t quite figure out his gender identity. When Chase starts his freshman year of college, he has to navigate being away from home and missing his sister, finding his squad, and contending with his ex-best friend Leila who is gunning for the same exclusive mentorship. If only he can pull together a short for the freshman animation showcase at the end of the semester.
Then Chase meets Jack Reid, a pragmatic poet who worships words and longs to experience life outside of his sheltered world. But Chase throws everything into question for Jack, who is still discovering his sexual identity, having grown up in close-knit conservative family. Jack internalized a lot of homophobia from his parents and childhood best friend, who unexpectedly visit campus, which threatens to destroy their relationship. Chase will have to learn to love–and be enough for–himself, while discovering what it means to truly live.
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In this young adult novel by award-winning author Anna-Marie McLemore, two non-binary teens are pulled into a magical world under a lake – but can they keep their worlds above water intact?
Everyone who lives near the lake knows the stories about the world underneath it, an ethereal landscape rumored to be half-air, half-water. But Bastián Silvano and Lore Garcia are the only ones who’ve been there. Bastián grew up both above the lake and in the otherworldly space beneath it. Lore’s only seen the world under the lake once, but that one encounter changed their life and their fate.
Then the lines between air and water begin to blur. The world under the lake drifts above the surface. If Bastián and Lore don’t want it bringing their secrets to the surface with it, they have to stop it, and to do that, they have to work together. There’s just one problem: Bastián and Lore haven’t spoken in seven years, and working together means trusting each other with the very things they’re trying to hide.
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The Fountains of Silence meets Spinning Silver in this rollicking tale set amid the 1956 Hungarian revolution in post-WWII Communist Budapest from Sydney Taylor Honor winner Katherine Locke.
In the middle of Budapest, there is a river. Csilla knows the river is magic. During WWII, the river kept her family safe when they needed it most–safe from the Holocaust. But that was before the Communists seized power. Before her parents were murdered by the Soviet police. Before Csilla knew things about her father’s legacy that she wishes she could forget.
Now Csilla keeps her head down, planning her escape from this country that has never loved her the way she loves it. But her carefully laid plans fall to pieces when her parents are unexpectedly, publicly exonerated. As the protests in other countries spur talk of a larger revolution in Hungary, Csilla must decide if she believes in the promise and magic of her deeply flawed country enough to risk her life to help save it, or if she should let it burn to the ground.
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Recently divorced and on the verge of bankruptcy, Dahlia Woodson is ready to reinvent herself on the popular reality competition show Chef’s Special. Too bad the first memorable move she makes is falling flat on her face, sending fish tacos flying—not quite the fresh start she was hoping for. Still, she’s focused on winning, until she meets someone she might want a future with more than she needs the prize money.
After announcing their pronouns on national television, London Parker has enough on their mind without worrying about the klutzy competitor stationed in front of them. They’re there to prove the trolls—including a fellow contestant and their dad—wrong, and falling in love was never part of the plan.
As London and Dahlia get closer, reality starts to fall away. Goodbye, guilt about divorce, anxiety about uncertain futures, and stress from transphobia. Hello, hilarious shenanigans on set, wedding crashing, and spontaneous dips into the Pacific. But as the finale draws near, Dahlia and London’s steamy relationship starts to feel the heat both in and outside the kitchen—and they must figure out if they have the right ingredients for a happily ever after.
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![Base Notes by [Lara Elena Donnelly]](https://i0.wp.com/m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41am7uKisYL.jpg?w=230&ssl=1)
In New York City everybody needs a side hustle, and perfumer Vic Fowler has developed a delicate art that has proved to be very lucrative: creating bespoke scents that evoke immersive memories—memories that, for Vic’s clients, are worth killing for. But the city is expensive, and these days even artisanal murder doesn’t pay the bills. When Joseph Eisner, a former client with deep pockets, offers Vic an opportunity to expand the enterprise, the money is too good to turn down. But the job is too intricate—and too dangerous—to attempt alone.
Manipulating fellow struggling artists into acting as accomplices is easy. Like Vic, they too are on the verge of burnout and bankruptcy. But as relationships become more complicated, Vic’s careful plans start to unravel. Hounded by guilt and a tenacious private investigator, Vic grows increasingly desperate to complete Eisner’s commission. Is there anyone—friends, lovers, coconspirators—that Vic won’t sacrifice for art?
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The jellyfish commonly known as a Portuguese man o’ war is neither Portuguese, nor a jellyfish, nor a man, nor even a singular organism. If you can cope with those facts, you can begin to understand River McIntyre, an elite high school swimmer who’s bad at counting laps.
River McIntyre has lived all their life in the shadow of Sea Planet, a now infamous ocean theme park slowly going out of business in the middle of Ohio. As Sea Planet drifts toward its final end, so does River’s high school career and, worse, their time as a competitive swimmer. Or maybe not. When River makes an impulsive dive into Ocean Planet’s shark tank, they unintentionally set off on a wrenching journey of self-discovery, from internalized homophobia and self-loathing through layers of coming out, gender confirmation surgery, and true love. And at the end of this race? Who knows. After all, counting laps has never been River’s strong suit.
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Simone Larkspur is a perfectionist pastry expert with a dream job at The Discerning Chef, a venerable cookbook publisher in New York City. All she wants to do is create the perfect loaf of sourdough and develop recipes, but when The Discerning Chef decides to bring their brand into the 21st century by pivoting to video, Simone is thrust into the spotlight and finds herself failing at something for the first time in her life.
To make matters worse, Simone has to deal with Ray Lyton, the new test kitchen manager, whose obnoxious cheer and outgoing personality are like oil to Simone’s water. When Ray accidentally becomes a viral YouTube sensation with a series of homebrewing videos, their eccentric editor in chief forces Simone to work alongside the chipper upstart or else risk her beloved job. But the more they work together, the more Simone realizes her heart may be softening like butter for Ray. Things get even more complicated when Ray comes out at work as nonbinary to mixed reactions—and Simone must choose between the career she fought so hard for and the person who just might take the cake (and her heart).
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Morgan Flowers just wants to hide. Raised by their neurodivergent father, Morgan has grown up haunted by the absence of their mysterious mother Zoe, especially now, as they navigate their gender identity and the turmoil of first love. Their father Julian has raised Morgan with care, but he can’t quite fill the gap left by the dazzling and destructive Zoe, who fled to Europe on Morgan’s first birthday. And when Zoe is dumped by her girlfriend Brigid, she suddenly comes crashing back into Morgan and Julian’s lives, poised to disrupt the fragile peace they have so carefully cultivated.
Through it all, Julian and Brigid have become unlikely pen-pals and friends, united by the knowledge of what it’s like to love and lose Zoe; they both know that she hasn’t changed. Despite the red flags, Morgan is swiftly drawn into Zoe’s glittering orbit and into a series of harmful missteps, and Brigid may be the only link that can pull them back from the edge.
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It’s book week at school, and nonbinary fourth grader Riley and their best friends craft hard for the Dress Like Your Favorite Character Day. Colorful fabric! Paint! Glitter! They are ready to make the biggest and best group costume ever! But most of the other kids are having trouble coming up with costumes. Riley is ready to use their creativity and vision to help as many kids as possible so dress-up day will be a big success!
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Mars has always been the lesser twin, the shadow to his sister Caroline’s radiance. But when Caroline dies under horrific circumstances, Mars is propelled to learn all he can about his once-inseparable sister who’d grown tragically distant.
Mars’s genderfluidity means he’s often excluded from the traditions — and expectations — of his politically-connected family. This includes attendance at the prestigious Aspen Conservancy Summer Academy where his sister poured so much of her time. But with his grief still fresh, he insists on attending in her place.
What Mars finds is a bucolic fairytale not meant for him. Folksy charm and sun-drenched festivities camouflage old-fashioned gender roles and a toxic preparatory rigor. Mars seeks out his sister’s old friends: a group of girls dubbed the Honeys, named for the beehives they maintain behind their cabin. They are beautiful and terrifying — and Mars is certain they’re connected to Caroline’s death.
But the longer he stays at Aspen, the more the sweet mountain breezes give way to hints of decay. Mars’s memories begin to falter, bleached beneath the relentless summer sun. Something is hunting him in broad daylight, toying with his mind. If Mars can’t find it soon, it will eat him alive.
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Moon has been plunged into a swill of uncertainty and confusion. They travel to the spirit realms every night, hoping never to return to the world of the living.
But when the realm is threatened, it’s up to Moon to save the spirit world, which sparks their own healing journey through the powerful, baffling, landscape that depression can cause.
From this novel’s very first utterance, author Kacen Callender puts us behind Moon’s eyes so that we, too, are engulfed by Moon’s troubling exploration through mental illness.
Moon’s mom is trying her best, but is clueless about what to do to reach the ugly roiling of her child’s inner struggles. At the same time, though, there are those who see Moon for who they are – Blue, the Keeper, the Magician, Wolf. These creature-guides help Moon find a way out of darkness. The ethereal aspects of the story are brilliantly blended with real-world glimmers of light. Slowly, Moon grows toward hope and wholeness, showing all children that each and every one of us has a tree growing inside. That our souls emerge when we discover, and fully accept, ourselves.
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The Unbalancing is R. B. Lemberg’s new novel in their acclaimed Birdverse. It is the tale of Erígra Lilún, an autistic nonbinary poet, and Ranra Kekeri, a new Starkeeper, as they try to save their island home from sinking. The Unbalancing explores deep names, the magic system of Birdverse, as well as the starlore unique to Lemberg’s world. Readers will learn the origin of the stars and what they are made of through Ranra and Lilún’s efforts to understand the Star of the Tides. Birdverse fans may recognise the story from R. B.’s 2015 poem, “Ranra’s Unbalancing,” which placed 1st in the Strange Horizons Readers Poll that year.
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Lark Winters wants to be a writer, and for now that means posting on their social media accounts––anything to build their platform. When former best friend Kasim accidentally posts on Lark’s Twitter a thread declaring his love for a secret, unrequited crush, Lark’s tweets are suddenly the talk of the school—and beyond. To protect Kasim, Lark decides to take the fall, pretending they accidentally posted the thread in reference to another classmate. It seems like a great idea: Lark gets closer to their crush, Kasim keeps his privacy, and Lark’s social media stats explode. But living a lie takes a toll—as does the judgment of thousands of Internet strangers. Lark tries their best to be perfect at all costs, but nothing seems good enough for the anonymous hordes––or for Kasim, who is growing closer to Lark, just like it used to be between them . . .
In the end, Lark must embrace their right to their messy emotions and learn how to be in love.
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![My Name Is Magic by [Xan van Rooyen]](https://i0.wp.com/m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51gv90X2T6L.jpg?resize=212%2C339&ssl=1)
Taika Turunen has no magic.
Despite coming from a long line of powerful Finnish mages, and their name literally meaning magic, Taika can’t perform the simplest of spells.
Forced to attend Myrskyjärvi International School for the Magically Gifted on account of their mom being principal, Taika has a hard time fitting in. Sometimes, they wonder if not having magic has something to do with the fact they’re neither a girl nor a boy and if they’re fated to be Taika the Talentless forever.
Life goes from bad to worse when Taika sees a liekkiö and recognizes the spirit’s voice begging for help as that of their former BFF and major crush, Natalie Khumalo, whose recent absence from class hadn’t gone unnoticed. When more students go missing, Taika must take the lead in a race against time to save friends old and new before a powerful cabal of chaos mages can unleash the legendary Sampo, an artifact capable of either renewing the world’s waning magic or destroying everything Taika holds dear.
To rescue Natalie, Taika will have to journey to the liminal space between worlds where they’ll be forced to battle mythical monsters and their own flagging self-esteem. In doing so, Taika might just discover that magic—and love—comes in many different forms.
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Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn’t have a name other than Shtetl). The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young emigrants goes missing, Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her.
Along the way the angel and demon encounter humans in need of their help, including Rose Cohen, whose best friend (and the love of her life) has abandoned her to marry a man, and Malke Shulman, whose father died mysteriously on his way to America.
But there are obstacles ahead of them as difficult as what they’ve left behind. Medical exams (and demons) at Ellis Island. Corrupt officials, cruel mob bosses, murderers, poverty. The streets are far from paved with gold.
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Good Dream Dragon comes to the rescue in easing a child’s bedtime fears in this magical story featuring a nonbinary child.
When a young child is afraid to go to sleep, they call on the Good Dream Dragon to help lead the way. Together, the pair race past comets as they travel through the night galaxy, making their way to the magical world of Dreamland.
This soothing bedtime story celebrates imagination as a way to help alleviate a child’s bedtime jitters. It is a gentle reminder to children that comfort is always within reach.
My name is Callie, and I’m not a girl. I am here as Papa’s squire, and I want to train as a knight.
In a world where girls learn magic and boys train as knights, twelve-year-old nonbinary Callie doesn’t fit in anywhere. And you know what? That’s just fine. Callie has always known exactly what they want to be, and they’re not about to let a silly thing like gender rules stand in their way.
When their ex-hero dad is summoned back to the royal capital of Helston to train a hopeless crown prince as war looms, Callie lunges at the opportunity to finally prove themself worthy to Helston’s great and powerful.
Except the intolerant great and powerful look at Callie and only see girl.
Trapped in Helston’s rigid hierarchy, Callie discovers they aren’t alone–there’s Elowen, the chancellor’s brilliant daughter, whose unparalleled power is being stifled; Edwyn, Elowen’s twin brother, locked in a desperate fight to win his father’s approval; and Willow, the crown prince who was never meant to be king.
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It’s 2003, and artist Dawn Levit is stuck. A bookbinder who works in conservation at the Met, she spends her free time scouting the city’s street art, hoping something might spark inspiration. Instead, everything looks like a dead end. And art isn’t the only thing that feels wrong: wherever she turns, her gender identity clashes with the rest of her life. Her relationship, once anchored by shared queerness, is falling apart as her boyfriend Lukas increasingly seems to be attracted to Dawn only when she’s at her most masculine. Meanwhile at work, Dawn has to present as female, even on the days when that isn’t true. Either way, her difference feels like a liability.
Then, one day at work, Dawn finds something hidden behind the endpaper of an old book: the torn-off cover of a ‘50s lesbian pulp novel, Turn Her About. On the front is a campy illustration of a woman looking into a handheld mirror and seeing a man’s face. And on the back is a love letter.
Dawn latches onto the coincidence, becoming obsessed with tracking down the note’s author. Her fixation only increases when her best friend Jae is injured in a hate crime, for which Dawn feels responsible. As Dawn searches for the letter’s author, she is also looking for herself. She tries to understand how to live in a world that doesn’t see her as she truly is, how to get unstuck in her gender, and how to rediscover her art, and she can’t shake the feeling that the note’s author might be able to help guide her to the answers.
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Twelve-year-old Abigail (she/her/hers) is so excited to spend her summer at Camp QUILTBAG, an inclusive retreat for queer and trans kids. She can’t wait to find a community where she can be herself—and, she hopes, admit her crush on Laura Dern to kids who will understand.
Thirteen-year-old Kai (e/em/eir) is not as excited. E just wants to hang out with eir best friend and eir parkour team. And e definitely does not want to think about the incident that left eir arm in a sling—the incident that also made Kai’s parents determined to send em somewhere e can feel like emself.
After a bit of a rocky start at camp, Abigail and Kai make a pact to help each other find their footing, all while navigating crushes, their queer identities, and a competition pitting cabin against cabin.
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Finding home. Falling in love. Fighting to belong.
The Santos Vista neighborhood of San Antonio, Texas, is all Ander Lopez has ever known. The smell of pan dulce. The mixture of Spanish and English filling the streets. And, especially their job at their family’s taquería. It’s the place that has inspired Ander as a muralist, and, as they get ready to leave for art school, it’s all of these things that give them hesitancy. That give them the thought, are they ready to leave it all behind?
To keep Ander from becoming complacent during their gap year, their family “fires” them so they can transition from restaurant life to focusing on their murals and prepare for college. That is, until they meet Santiago Garcia, the hot new waiter. Falling for each other becomes as natural as breathing. Through Santi’s eyes, Ander starts to understand who they are and want to be as an artist, and Ander becomes Santi’s first steps toward making Santos Vista and the United States feel like home.
Until ICE agents come for Santi, and Ander realizes how fragile that sense of home is. How love can only hold on so long when the whole world is against them. And when, eventually, the world starts to win.
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Jude Winters might be in over their head. Maybe. But they’ll never admit it.
They befriend the ex-popular girl, Stevie Morgan, create an all-ages safe space at their local library with their best friend, Dallas Knight, and come out as nonbinary to their grandparents.
When the club becomes an overnight success, friendships crumble, and their grandparents act like they’re stuck in the Stone Age, Jude fights to keep their world from tearing itself apart. But a twelve-year-old can only handle so much.
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Sixteen-year-old Bianca Torre is an avid birder undergoing a gender identity crisis and grappling with an ever-growing list of fears. Some, like Fear #6: Initiating Conversation, keep them constrained, forcing them to watch birds from the telescope in their bedroom. And, occasionally, their neighbors. When their gaze wanders from the birds to one particular window across the street, Bianca witnesses a creepy plague-masked murderer take their neighbor’s life. Worse, the death is ruled a suicide, forcing Bianca to make a choice—succumb to their long list of fears (including #3: Murder and #55: Breaking into a Dead Guy’s Apartment) or investigate what happened.
Bianca enlists the help of their friend Anderson Coleman, but the two have more knowledge of anime than true crime. As Bianca and Anderson dig deeper into the murder with a little help from Bianca’s crush and fellow birding aficionado, Elaine Yee (#13: Beautiful People, #11: Parents Discovering They’re A Raging Lesbian), the trio uncovers a conspiracy much larger—and weirder—than imagined. But when the killer catches wind of the investigation, Bianca’s #1 fear of public speaking doesn’t sound so bad compared to the threat of being silenced for good.
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On Mar León-de la Rosa’s 16th birthday, el Diablo comes calling. Mar is a transmasculine nonbinary teen pirate hiding a magical ability to manipulate fire and ice. But their magic isn’t enough to reverse a wicked bargain made by their father and now el Diablo has come to collect his payment: the soul of Mar’s father and the entire crew of their ship.
When Mar is miraculously rescued by the sole remaining pirate crew in the Caribbean, el Diablo returns to give them a choice: give up your soul to save your father by the Harvest Moon or never see him again. The task is impossible–Mar refuses to make a bargain and there’s no way their magic is any match for el Diablo. Then, Mar finds the most unlikely allies: Bas, an infuriatingly arrogant and handsome pirate — and the captain’s son; and Dami, a genderfluid demonio whose motives are never quite clear. For the first time in their life, Mar may have the courage to use their magic. It could be their only redemption — or it could mean certain death.
When nineteen-year-old Fin volunteers to take her secret love’s place in their village’s Finding, she is terrified. Those who are chosen at the Finding are whisked away to Castle Courtsheart, a vampire school where human students either succeed and become vampires, fail and spend the rest of their lives as human thralls…or they don’t survive long enough to become either.
Fin is determined to forge a different path: learn how to kill the undead and get revenge for her mother, who was taken by the vampires years ago. But Courtsheart is as captivating as it is deadly, and Fin is quickly swept up in her new world and its inhabitants – particularly Gavron, her handsome and hostile vampire maker, whose blood is nothing short of intoxicating. As Fin begins to discover new aspects of her own identity and test her newfound powers, she stumbles across a string of murders that may be connected to a larger ritual – one with potentially lethal consequences for vampires and humans alike. Fin must uncover the truth and find the killer before she loses her life…or betrays her own heart.
