Sponsored by Battle of the Bands edited by Lauren Gibaldi and Eric Smith.
A daughter of music royalty has a secret crush. A lonely ticket taker worries about his sister. An almost-famous songwriter nurses old wounds. A stage manager tires of being behind the scenes. A singer-songwriter struggles to untangle her feelings for her best friend and his girlfriend. The disparate protagonists of sixteen stories are thrown together for one unforgettable event: their high school’s battle of the bands. Told in a harmonic blend of voices, short stories offer a kaleidoscopic view of the same transformative night. Battle of the Bands is a celebration of youth, music, and meeting the challenges of life head-on.
Hi friends! I hope you’re doing well. It finally got properly rainy yesterday, and I know I’ll get tired of it soon, but right now I am celebrating. It’s my ideal reading weather! Now, did I scroll through TikTok instead of reading? Sure. But I appreciate the ambience anyways.
Today I wanted to highlight the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which provides legal aid to low income trans, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people of color in New York City. You can find out more about them on the SRLP website and you can help out using their donation page.
Queer eBooks Under $5
Lots of other Book Riot newsletters include a deals section, so I thought I’d try it out once! These are all queer ebooks under $5 at the time of writing. Some are always under $5 and some are just on sale at the moment. Enjoy!
Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee for $0.99
A pacifist non-binary artist is recruited to work as a kind of mystical coder for the military. While working for the Razanei government, though, they discover the military is even worse than they thought… and then they accidentally give a dragon automaton free will. Now Jebi finds themselves with a mechanical war dragon companion, up against a tyrannical government.
Meet Cute Diary by Emery Lee for $1.99
Noah runs Meet Cute Diary, a Tumblr blog where trans people send in their adorable, romantic meet cutes. It brings a lot of trans people hope and comfort. There’s just one problem: it’s not real. Noah writes them all himself. When he’s caught, he jumps into a fake dating scheme to try to give the blog he loves so much some credibility. But actually dating is a little more messy than his neat fictional meet cutes.
- Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas (Trans M/M YA Fantasy) for $2.99
- Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun by Jonny Garza Villa (M/M YA Contemporary) for $1.99
- The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer (M/M YA Sci Fi) for $1.99
- Pumpkin by Julie Murphy (Gay YA Contemporary) for $2.99
- B*Witch by Paige McKenzie & Nancy Ohlin (Sapphic YA Fantasy) for $2.99
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- The Midnight Lie (Forgotten Gods #1) Marie Rutkoski (F/F YA Fantasy) for $2.99
- Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children #1) by Seanan McGuire (Asexual Fantasy) for $2.99
- The Amberlough Dossier: Amberlough, Armistice, Amnesty by Lara Elena Donnelly (Queer Fantasy) for $2.99
- The Ascendant Trilogy by K Arsenault Rivera (Sapphic Fantasy) for $2.99
- The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle #1) Nghi Vo (Sapphic Fantasy) for $3.99
- Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard (Sapphic Fantasy) for $3.99
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- The Unbroken (Magic of the Lost #1) C. L. Clark (Sapphic Fantasy) for $4.99
- The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang (Non-Binary Fantasy) for $3.99
- Finna (LitenVerse Book 1) by Nino Cipri (Queer Sci Fi) for $2.99
- Knit One, Girl Two by Shira Glassman (F/F Romance) for $1.99
- The Craft of Love by EE Ottoman (Trans and Bisexual M/F Historical Romance) for $1.99
- Once Ghosted, Twice Shy by Alyssa Cole (F/F Romance) for $2.99
- The Second Mango by Shira Glassman (F/F Fantasy) for $2.99
- The Cybernetic Tea Shop by Meredith Katz (Asexual F/F Sci Fi)
Whoops, didn’t intend for that to get so long, but there are a ton of great queer YA ebook deals right now! Apologies for your wallet!
All the Links Fit to Click
- Judith Butler called out TERFs as fascists, but the Guardian censored the interview.
- LGBTQ Reads has a list of queer Latinx books for Hispanic & Latine Heritage Month! Don’t forget to click through to earlier Hispanic & Latine Heritage Month posts for even more recs.
- It’s Sapphic September! If you’re participating in this readathon, here’s a bingo card to help guide your choices!
- These bisexual books are “under the gaydar:” the queer content isn’t obvious from the covers. (Also, bonus ace rep!)
- These 10 LGBTQ+ Marvel heroes should join the MCU.
- Here are 5 queer YA dark academia books.
- Check out these queer historical romances.
- These sapphic YA books have West Asian representation.
- Support this bisexual comics anthology Kickstarter.
- What’s In A Name? On Writing Jewish Families In Queer Romance
- A Dream of a Woman by Casey Plett, a short story collection featuring trans woman main characters, has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize.
- Kevin Keller is getting an omnibus for his 10th anniversary of appearing in Archie! For some reason there’s a Kickstarter, even though this is an official Archie book.
- Mark Oshiro was interviewed at Reads Rainbow about their new middle grade novel, The Insiders.
- On Freedom by Maggie Nelson was reviewed at NPR and The Guardian. She was also interviewed at NPR about it.
- The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw was reviewed at NPR. They call it a “visionary, foul-mouthed, gory sci-fi adventure, dripping viscera, violence, and beauty in equal measure,” and I agree.
- The Magician by Colm Tóibín was reviewed at the Washington Post.
- The One You Want to Marry (and Other Identities I’ve Had) by Sophie Santos was reviewed at Autostraddle.
LGBTQ Book Riot Posts
I’ve taken a page from the Kissing Books romance newsletter and am going to start including a few LGBTQ posts “from the vault” here, since there are so many great ones you might have missed!
- 8 New Adult LGBTQ Romance Reads You’ll Fall For
- Teacher Pulled From Classroom After Highlighting Inclusive Materials: your rage read of the day.
- From the vault: The Sapphic Fantastic: Lesbian & Bi Women Fantasy Books
- The Power of Portals: Seeing My Own Future in Graphic Novels About Queer Elders
- 5 YA Books About Fighting Biphobia
New Releases This Week
The Spectacular by Zoe Whittall (Bisexual Fiction)
Missy made a name for herself as a cellist in a punk band by performing a song about her absent mother every night. Her hard partying ways catch up to her, though, when she unexpectedly falls for a tomboy drummer — oh, and also gets stranded at the border because of a forgotten flap of cocaine. She crashes at her grandmother’s house, but her grandmother is determined to get all three generations of women in the family on the same page again. This is a story about maternal ambivalence: what happens when a mother regrets having children?
Peter Cabot Gets Lost by Cat Sebastian (M/M Romance)
Cat Sebastian has a devoted fanbase who will have been counting down until this release! It’s the second in the Cabot family series. Caleb has just graduated from a Boston college in 1960 and is stranded, with no way to get to Los Angeles and start his new life. Good news: classmate Peter Cabot has offered to drive him there to escape from his father’s presidential campaign. Bad news: Caleb hates Peter.
Witch Rising (B*WITCH #2) by Paige McKenzie & Nancy Ohlin (Sapphic YA Fantasy)
In this concluding volume of the B*Witch duology, the two covens at school continue to spar, but they have bigger problems: an anti-magic faction may be responsible for killing a witch. They have to join forces to find out the truth. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s also the romantic complications: Ridley has a crush on a dead girl, and Iris is trying to catch Greta’s eye before the new witch does. But, of course, “queer witch YA” should have been enough to convince you to pick this series up already.
A Lot Like Adiós by Alexis Daria (Bi M/Bi F Romance)
Love and Lotus Blossoms by Anne Shade (Bisexual F/F Romance)
Master of Poisons by Andrea Hairston (Bisexual Fantasy) (Paperback release)
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The Actual Star by Monica Byrne (Non-Binary World Sci-Fi)
Oaths of Legacy (The Bloodright Trilogy #2) by Emily Skrutskie (M/M Science Fiction)
Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body by Megan Milks (YA Contemporary)
The Scratch Daughters (Scapegracers #2) by Hannah Abigail Clarke (Sapphic YA Fantasy)
The Hollow Heart (Forgotten Gods #2) by Marie Rutkoski (Sapphic YA Fantasy)
The Lost Girls by Sonia Hartl (F/F Paranormal YA)
Monstress, Vol. 6: The Vow by Marjorie M. Liu & Sana Takeda (Sapphic Fantasy Graphic Novel)
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Passion by June Jordan (reprint) (Bisexual Poetry)
Villainy by Andrea Abi-Karam (Queer Poetry)
808s & Otherworlds by Sean Avery Medlin (Queer Poetry)
Umbilical Cord by Hasan Namir (Two Dads Poetry)
A Quilt for David by Steven Reigns (Gay Poetry/Biography)
Early One Morning by Lawrence Schimel and Elīna Brasliņa (Two Dads Board Book)
That’s it for me this week! Until next time, you can find me at the Lesbrary as well as on Twitter @danikaellis. You can also hear me on All the Books on the first Tuesday of the month, and I post weekly New Releases videos on the Book Riot Youtube channel. You can bet I sneak in as many queer titles as I can.
Happy reading!
Danika