The Queer Books I’ve Been Reading Lately

Starting with my most recent read, this is a graphic novel from the author of the Check Please! series. It follows an art student after her funding falls through. She finds a scholarship that will go to any sports team that wins a game within the semester, so she starts a ragtag softball team. The team are all art students, mostly not athletes, and most of them are queer. I really enjoyed both the art style and the story, which has a bit of a sapphic romantic subplot, but it’s mostly about friendship. I highly recommend this one!

As animal lover and a queer cozy fantasy fan, this book set at a magical zoo seemed perfect for me. I ended up being of two minds about it, though. It is cozy, and I liked the main character, especially her growth over the course of the book. But I also found it overly descriptive — do I need to know every biome on this planet? — and I saw the ending coming about 400 pages away. I would have liked more time spent on the sapphic romance, which had a fun dynamic. Also, call me an incurable leftist, but I’d rather my cozy fantasy didn’t have police or guns in it. On another note, I am a little confused that the main character seems to be clearly coded autistic, but it’s not acknowledged in the book or marketing — only her anxiety diagnosis is. I enjoyed reading this, and I look forward to what the author writes next, but it didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

This one comes out September 3rd, and I’ll be recommending it on that episode of All the Books. I read White’s The Spirit Bares Its Teeth and really enjoyed it, so I had to pick up his newest. This is a bloody, brutal YA thriller set in Appalachia, where a feud between Miles Abernathy’s family and the county’s Sheriff Davies’s family has raged for generations, with a death count that just keeps growing. Miles is a queer trans teenager, and he’s also a socialist. After he’s attacked, he begins to see the ghost of his relative, who was executed for his union work for miners. This is political, gory, and surprising. Now I need to go back to read White’s first book, Hell Followed with Us!

This is the latest from the author of Red, White & Royal Blue and One Last Stop, and it may be my new favorite romance novel. It follows two bisexual exes who end up on a wine and food tour across Europe together, and they bet on which of them can sleep with someone from each city they visit first. It’s steamy, for sure, but then there’s the passionate descriptions of the food and wine as well as the beautiful locales that really adds to the decadence. My favourite part, though, is the yearning and the wholesome friends to lovers relationship between the main characters. They love each other so much!

I wanted to do some real summer reading, so I picked up this sapphic summer camp romance. The first half was a bit slow to me, because there isn’t a ton of conflict: Juliette and Priya are less “enemies to lovers” and more “annoyed by each other to accidentally falling for each other.” Once they started actually bantering and flirting though, it was a fun, absorbing read.