Tag Archives: Jennifer Dugan

Happy Bi Visibility Day 2025!

It’s Bi Visibility Day, and we’re celebrating as we do with books starring bi main characters! For even more recs, check out past years’ posts!

Young Adult

Wish You Weren’t Here by Erin Baldwin

All’s fair in love and Color War.

Juliette doesn’t hate Priya Pendley.

At least, not in the way teen movies say she should hate the hot popular girl. They don’t do cat fights, love triangles, or betrayal. To survive their intertwined small town lives, they’ve agreed to a truce. They complete group projects without fighting, never gossip to mutual friends, and stand on opposite sides of photos so it’s easy to crop each other out.

Priya seems to have everything during the school year—social media stardom, the handsome track captain boyfriend, and millions of adoring fans—and Juliette is at peace with that. Because Juliette has the summer, and the one place she never feels like “too much”: Fogridge Sleepaway Camp.

But her hopes for a few Priya-free weeks are shattered when her rival shows up at Fogridge on move-in day… as her cabinmate, no less. Juliette is determined to enjoy her final summer, even if it means (gag) tolerating her childhood rival, but everything that can go wrong, does.

If Juliette can’t find something to like about her situation—and about Priya—she risks hating the only home she’s ever had, right before she says goodbye to it forever.

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon

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August 2025 Deal Announcements

Adult Fiction

Hurston/Wright fellow and Syracuse MFA graduate Erica Frederick‘s FIGHT IN THE NIGHT, a queer coming-of-age novel set during one endless, storm-filled summer that follows a teenage girl—the only daughter of Haitian immigrants—and her five older brothers as they barrel through the Florida suburbs, where she must learn to grow bigger in a world that insists on her smallness, to Emily Polson at Scribner, at auction, by Iwalani Kim at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates (NA).

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June 2025 Deal Announcements

Adult Fiction

Lambda Literary Award and Goodreads Choice finalist and author of OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA and PRIVATE RITES Julia Armfield‘s UP TO THE LIGHT, set in the beautiful but deadly world of alpine mountaineering, following two climbers in the aftermath of an expedition in the Italian Alps that went horribly wrong, who believe something more sinister than bad conditions and bad weather may have been involved, pitched as INTO THIN AIR meets THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE by way of Brokeback Mountain, to Caroline Bleeke at Flatiron Books, in a significant deal, by Olivia Maidment at Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency.

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May 2025 Deal Announcements

Adult Fiction

University of Minnesota MFA graduate Andrea Uptmor‘s THE NEW PEOPLE, pitched for readers of Mary Beth Keane and Claire Lombardo, in which a newly married lesbian couple moves into a flipped foreclosure in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, unaware that the former homeowners are still living in the attic; exploring themes of motherhood, economic survival, and what it means to belong, to Gabriella Mongelli at Little, Brown, in a pre-empt, by Natalie Edwards at Trellis Literary Management (world).

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New Releases: May 13, 2025

This post is sponsored by Penguin Random House Canada in honor of The Vinyl Diaries: Sex, Deep Cuts, and My Soundtrack to Queer Joy by Pete Crighton. Big hearted, funny, thoughtful, and wildly entertaining, The Vinyl Diaries is a celebration of sex, music and the discovery of our true selves.

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | Indigo

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Happy National Girls and Women in Sports Day 2025!

Happy National Girls and Women in Sports Day! In celebration, here are a whole bunch of books that center queer girls and women in sports! (For even more recs, check out these past posts!)

Middle Grade

It’s All or Nothing, Vale by Andrea Beatriz Arango

All these months of staring at the wall?
All these months of feeling weak?
It’s ending—
I’m going back to fencing.
And then it’ll be
like nothing ever happened.

No one knows hard work and dedication like Valentina Camacho. And Vale’s thing is fencing. She’s the top athlete at her fencing gym. Or she was . . . until the accident.

After months away, Vale is finally cleared to fence again, but it’s much harder than before. Her body doesn’t move the way it used to, and worst of all is the new number one: Myrka. When she sweeps Vale aside with her perfect form and easy smile, Vale just can’t accept that. But the harder Vale fights to catch up, the more she realizes her injury isn’t the only thing holding her back. If she can’t leave her accident in the past, then what does she have to look forward to?

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon

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Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Young Adult Fiction: January-June 2025

Today’s post is sponsored in honor of the upcoming paperback release of Sydney Taylor Honor book Going Bicoastal, coming May 27th from Wednesday Books!

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The Last Bookstore on Earth by Lily Braun-Arnold (January 7th)

The world is about to end. Again.

Ever since the first Storm wreaked havoc on civilization as we know it, seventeen-year-old Liz Flannery has been holed up in an abandoned bookstore in suburban New Jersey where she used to work, trading books for supplies with the few remaining survivors. It’s the one place left that feels safe to her.

Until she learns that another earth-shattering Storm is coming . . . and everything changes.

Enter Maeve, a prickly and potentially dangerous out-of-towner who breaks into the bookstore looking for shelter one night. Though the two girls are immediately at odds, Maeve has what Liz needs—the skills to repair the dilapidated store before the next climate disaster strikes—and Liz reluctantly agrees to let her stay.

As the girls grow closer and undeniable feelings spring up between them, they realize that they face greater threats than the impending Storm. And when Maeve’s secrets and Liz’s inner demons come back to haunt them both, they find themselves fighting for their lives as their world crumbles around them.

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon

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New Releases: August 27, 2024

Young Adult

Practical Rules for Cursed Witches by Kayla Cottingham

Magic is in Delilah Bea’s blood. Her absentee father is the world’s most famous cursebreaker, while all the women in her family are fated to never find true love. So when Delilah graduates her magical training and must complete her Calling, she has the perfect task in mind—to break the Bea family curse.

But Delilah’s Calling is hijacked by Kieran Pelumbra, a member of the wealthiest and most powerful family in the country, and breaking his curse suddenly becomes her official assignment. Every generation, a pair of Pelumbra twins are doomed, with one twin draining the other of their life and magic. Each day, Kieran grows weaker while his sister Briar gets closer to…something monstrous.

As Delilah and the twins set out on their quest, they quickly realize that breaking the Pelumbra curse isn’t going to be simple. For one, the Pelumbra family doesn’t actually want their curse broken—and they’ve sent hunters after them to ensure they fail. Secondly…it’s Briar. There’s just something about her that gets under Delilah’s skin and makes her want to kiss the perpetually grumpy look off her face. But with time running out for the twins and Delilah’s own curse getting in the way, they may not stand a chance of finding their Happily Ever After.

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon 

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