Ya books with gay characters
Sapphic Young Adult Books with Complicated Families
Here&#;s a trope I didn&#;t realize I loved in a YA novel: complicated families. Whether it&#;s an unusual family configuration, strained parent relationships, or long-lost siblings, I cherish seeing queer stories that explore all the different ways biological families can look. I arrive from a very loving and supportive but also fairly complicated family, so this topic is close to my heart. So here are a rare of my favorite YA books with complicated families!
Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
There&#;s a good chance you&#;re already familiar with this one, because it was hugely popular when it came out! This is a story told in verse about two sisters: one in New York and one in the Dominican Republic. Yahaira lives in New York Noun with her mother and her father, and Camino only sees her father once a year, when he comes to visit the Dominican Republic&#;but they actually don&#;t know about each other until their father dies.
This is a story about grief, but it&#;s also about trying to navigate t
Today&#;s post is sponsored in honor of the upcoming paperback release of Sydney Taylor Honor guide Going Bicoastal, coming May 27th from Wednesday Books!
***
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 protected 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 darkness. 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 enable her stay.
As the girls grow closer and undeniable feelings spring up between them, they grasp that they tackle greater
Recent Posts
I haven&#;t done a top ten in a while, so I figured it was second. I usually aim to read more LGBTQ+ books during Pride Month, but since I got off to a slow start and didn&#;t post anything for basically the first half of the month, I figured I&#;d overcompensate with an extra-long list that includes both books that I&#;ve loved for years and some that I&#;ve just discovered recently.
Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdomby Leigh Bardugo
Genre: YA Fantasy
Queer Representation: Of the main characters, two are bisexual and one is gay. There is one major m/m romance and one additional minor queer character. In the sequel series, there is a queer relationship between a bisexual woman and a trans noun (note: he does not come out until near the end&#;to anyone, including himself&#; and therefore presents as female and uses she/her pronouns until then).
Brief Review: Six of Crows has posthaste become one of my all-time favorite books. It’s basically Ocean’s Eleven with actually amazing characters dumped into a uniquely inspired fantasy setting. There are few
I don’t believe in the idea of guilty pleasures. I even used to run a pop culture blog centered around the evidence that they shouldn’t be a thing—we should never possess to feel at fault about something that brings us pleasure. Growing up queer, it can be really easy to be made to feel guilty about what you might secretly love, because it might not fit the rigid yet contradictory gender norms you never really adhered to. Therefore, it can also take a long time for you to sense comfortable enjoying what you enjoy without shame or ridicule—from other people or from yourself. Internalized homophobia at its finest!
As a teenager, I rarely felt comfortable reading YA books, permit alone gay YA books, because I felt so disconnected and rejected by my age group—having never really shared the same interests or ideals of people my control age, and often being bullied for it—that I did anything I could to subtly and quietly set myself apart from kids my age. Adults called me an old soul, which I was, but I also didn’t feel free to live my verb life, and I faced the consequences of acting more grown up tha