YA contemporary. Queer Black girl in a mostly white, mostly well-off town in the midwestern US doesn’t get the big scholarship she’ll need to attend the university program of her dreams, so she decides to go after an alternative source of scholarship dollars by entering the superintense prom king/queen competition for which her school is …
YA contemporary. The book’s protagonist – who is Black, queer, and trans – is navigating all the stress and drama of adolescence at an arts-focused high school in Manhattan that his dad can hardly afford when an anonymous someone plasters pre-transition images hacked from his phone (accompanied by his deadname) all over the foyer of …
Science fiction and fantasy, all at once. As a cover blurb from a prominent genre author puts it, “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” Which on the one hand neatly captures some of the book’s key elements, but on the other hand doesn’t really capture its essence. I of course went into …
YA contemporary at heart, though it dabbles a bit in fantasy, mystery, and fairy tale. A tiny island off the east coast of a continent that is implied but not stated to be North America, an island known only for a rare bird that nests there in the summer and that draws a small but …
Sci-fi, I guess, of the 15-minutes-into-the-future variety. A group of oddball friends and the new kid in school, a girl who was a minor celebrity because her mother left her right after she was born to be part of the crew of the first ever space mission to leave the solar system – a long, …
Middle-grade. Contemporary. The book opens with the 12 year-old Sunny St. James about to enter surgery for a long-awaited heart transplant. With a penchant for gallows humour, rash decisions, and secret poetry, Sunny is committed to seizing the opportunity presented by her new heart – in the face of painful friend-drama, the sudden return of …
A novella by a fairly new sci-fi/fantasy author whose debut short story collection I read earlier this year and liked. Features two twenty-somethings precariously employed in low-wage retail jobs in a big box store – a sort of low-rent Ikea knock-off – who just broke up a few days before. A customer wanders into one …
Max ZB is a musician and photographer, and a member of the core organizing team for the Toronto-based queer and trans community arts festival Bricks and Glitter. Bricks and Glitter is a collective response to a lack in the present, and an insurgent act towards what the world could be. Its mission statement begins, “We are a trouble …
Short stories. Weird, creative, clearly influenced by both literary fiction and sci-fi. Pretty queer. The stories explore things like history and memory on a generation ship, a working-class teen on a cross-country road-trip with a rich woman in a car shaped like a whale, escaping anti-semitism in Europe and moving to America with a mechanical …
Graphic memoir. I’ve read a couple of graphic novels by the author, but picked this up somewhat randomly not so much for fannish reasons but because I figured it would be a light and quick read. And it was. Drawing largely from material she has previously published online, it follows her life from 2011 to …