Staff Picks

A fun and genuine early college story featuring two A-spec characters! The library's LGBTQIA book club for teens, Book Queeries, read and discussed this book with positive reviews from teen attendees who loved the story because it featured aromantic and asexual characters. Author Ann Zhao captures the undergrad anxiety well, while sprinkling multimedia dialogue throughout. Recommend to fans of Alice Oseman and Becky Albertalli.

 

Publisher description:

Sophie Chi is in her first year at Wellesley College (despite her parents’ wishes that she attend a 'real' university, rather than a liberal arts school) and has long accepted her aromantic and asexual identities. Despite knowing she’ll never fall in love, she enjoys running an Instagram account that offers relationship advice to students at Wellesley. No one except her roommate knows that she’s behind the incredibly popular 'Dear Wendy' account. When Joanna 'Jo' Ephron -- also a first-year student at Wellesley -- created their 'Sincerely Wanda' account, it wasn't at all meant to be serious or take off like it does -- not like Dear Wendy’s. But now they might have a rivalry of sorts with Dear Wendy? Oops. As if Jo’s not busy enough having existential crises over gender, the fact that she’ll never truly be loved or be enough, or her few friends finding The One and forgetting her! While tensions are rising online, Sophie and Jo are getting closer in real life, bonding over their shared aroace identities. As their friendship develops and they work together to start a campus organization for other a-spec students, can their growing bond survive if they learn just who’s behind the Wendy and Wanda accounts?

 

A Minor Chorus is equal parts love letter to storytelling and searing critique of colonialism. In true Billy-Ray Belcourt fashion, the writing is concise and lyrical, bringing sensation to the forefront and encouraging active participation from the reader. It doesn't shy away from hard truths, and yet the tone is stubbornly hopeful. This short book has changed my relationship with reading, writing, and the world.

Publisher’s description
A debut novel from a rising literary star that brings the modern queer and Indigenous experience into sharp relief. In Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel. He is adrift, caught between his childhood on the reservation and this new life of the urban intelligentsia. Billy-Ray Belcourt's unnamed narrator chronicles a series of encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted adult from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneliness punctuate the realities of queer life on the fringe. Amid these conversations, the narrator is haunted by memories of Jack, a cousin caught in the cycle of police violence, drugs, and survival. Jack's life parallels the narrator's own; the possibilities of escape and imprisonment are left to chance with colonialism stacking the odds. A Minor Chorus introduces the dazzling literary voice of a Lambda Literary Award winner and Canadian #1 national best-selling poet to the United States, shining much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival.

Find A Minor Chorus in our online catalog

The Secret History explores the world of a prestigious and exclusive fine arts school in New England and the exacerbating circumstances that drive a group of Classics students to commit murder. The novel is pensive and brooding, with the tendency to wax poetic, yet still be highly engaging.

 

Publisher description:

Richard Papen had never been to New England before his nineteenth year. Then he arrived at Hampeden College and quickly became seduced by the sweet, dark rhythms of campus life--in particular by an elite group of five students, Greek scholars, worldly, self-assured, and at first glance, highly unapproachable.

Find The Secret History in our online catalog

This graphic novel has it all: psychological horror, domestic housewife ennui, and a sexy ghost. I really loved how the author illustrated the main character's dreary life in monochrome while her fantasies are in gorgeous splashy color. The mystery will keep you guessing till the end.

 

Publisher's description: 
After many lonely years, Abby's just gotten married. She met her new husband--a recently widowed dentist--when he arrived in town with his young daughter, seeking a new start. Although it's strange living in the shadow of her predecessor, Abby does her best to be a good wife and mother. But the more she learns about her new husband's first wife, the more things don't add up. And Abby starts to wonder ... was Sheila's death really by natural causes? As Abby sinks deeper into confusion, Sheila's memory seems to become a force all its own, ensnaring Abby in a mystery that leaves her obsessed, fascinated, and desperately in love for the first time in her life.

 

Clocking in at 153 pages, this is the book to read when you're looking to get back into reading. Chambers writes a delightfully hopepunk near-future sci-fi set during climate crisis, in which astronaut Ariadne and three crewmates make a crowdfunded journey into space. Delightfully queer and sincere.

 

Publisher description:

In a stand-alone novella from the award-winning, critically acclaimed author of the Wayfarer series, Ariadne O'Neill and her crewmates are hard at work in a planetary system 15 light-years from Sol, on a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds. Faced with the possibility of returning to a planet that has forgotten those who have left, Ariadne begins to chronicle the wonders and dangers of her mission.

 

 

Publisher's description: 

Roaming marks a triumphant return to the graphic novel and deft foray into new adult fiction for Caldecott Medal-winning authors Jillian Tamaki (Boundless) and Mariko Tamaki (Cold). Over the course of a much-anticipated trip to New York, an unexpected fling blossoms between casual acquaintances and throws a long-term friendship off-balance. Emotional tensions vibrate wildly against the resplendently illustrated backdrop of the city, capturing a spontaneous queer romance in all of its fledgling glory. Slick attention to the details of a bustling, intimidating metropolis are softened with a palette of muted pastels, as though seen through the eyes of first-time travelers. The awe, wonder, and occasional stumble along the way all come to life with stunning accuracy in this sumptuous softcover with gorgeous jacket. Roaming is the third collaboration from the critically acclaimed team behind Skim and Governor General's Literary Award winner This One Summer. Moody, atmospheric, and teeming with life, the magic of this comics duo leaks through the pages with lush and exquisite pen work. The Tamakis' singular, elegant vision of an urban paradise slowly revealing its imperfections to the tune of its visitors' rhythms is a masterpiece–a future classic for generations to come.

 

One of the best books I read in 2020, but I feel it still hasn't gotten its due. Billy Ray Belcourt is a stunning queer, indigenous poet, philosopher, and scholar. It's an earth-shattering poetic memoir with resistance and radical joy at its core. For those to "whom utopia is a rallying cry."

 

Publisher description:

The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be. For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness.

 

 

 

This slim book is spare and thoughtful and exciting and quiet and funny and sad. And it is narrated by a hungry, queer mountain lion, who is trying to make a little bit of sense of their--and our--world. At one point, they explain: "I try to understand people but they make it hard." I know, right??

 

Publisher description:

A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanitý€™s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting the welfare of a nearby homeless encampment, observing obnoxious hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience.́ €œI have so much language in my braiń,€ our lion says,́ €œand nowhere to put it́.€ When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers calĺ €œellaý.€ As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief, while scrambling to avoid earthquakes, floods, and the noise of their own conflicted psyche. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one? In elegiac prose woven with humor, imagination, sensuality, and tragedy, Henry Hok這s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world told by a lovable mountain lion. Both feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings mythmaking to real life.

 

There are many tropes in horror that speak to queer people in (often contradictory) ways. This collection of essays guides us through favorites such as The Exorcist, Jennifer's Body, and Get Out to explore the reasons why such a dark film genre can attract such a diverse and marginalized community.

 

Publisher's description: Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes—such as the circumspect and resilient “final girl,” body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet—spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world. Twenty-five narrative essays by contemporary LGBTQ writers reflecting on queerness in horror film, from Hitchcock to Halloween.