i feel like it’s worth noting that although her name in the sky had a happy ending, a lot of the book deals with a lot of internalized as well as external homophobia and the bullying that the girls face can be kind of extreme, so be careful if you’re looking for feel good books!
and i forgot to add: She’s My Ride Home – Jackie Bushore
Embrace in Motion / Car Pool / Wild Thing / Just Like That / One Degree of Separation / Love by the Numbers / Substitute for Love / Finders Keepers / In Deep Waters / Warming Trend / Sugar / In Every Port / Roller Coaster / All the Wrong Places / Paperback Romance / The Kiss that Counted by Karin Kallmaker
The Wild One / Dreams Found / Getting There / Dream Lover / Always and Forever / The Feel of Forever by Lyn Denison
Sierra City / Love Waits / Devil’s Rock / Artist’s Dream / Storms / Coyote Sky / No Strings / One Summer Night / Gulf Breeze / Dawn of Change by Gerri Hill
Curious Wine by Katherine V Forrest
Silent Heart / Under the Southern Cross by Claire McNab
Butch Girls Can Fix Anything by Paula Offutt
Once More with Feeling by Peggy J Herring
Sea Legs / Sumter Point / Worth Every Step / Out of Love / The House on Sandstone by KG MacGregor
Payback by Gabrielle Goldsby
1049 Club by Kim Pritekel
Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher / Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary by Monica Nolan
Starting from Scratch / 96 Hours by Georgia Beers
Just Business by Julie Cannon
Something in the Wine by Jae
Wild at Heart by Layce Gardner
Green Eyed Monster by Gill McKnight
Babyji – Abha Dawesar
NEVER FORGET MY FAVORITE BOOK GUYS IT’S SO GOOD AND SO UNDERAPPRECIATED
a love story starring my dead best friend by emily horner
Tell me again how a crush should feel – sarah farizan
The summer i wasnt me – jessica verdi (this one is set in a gay-conversion camp though so fair warning!)
When Women Were Warriors – Catherine M Wilson. (Lady warriors with weapons! and POC main character?!)
Enchanting Bookworm Inspired Digital Illustrations by Simini Blocker
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Y’all, not to be that person… but if you are reading books that open with ten pages of exposition, spoon-feed the reader extraneous detail via infodumps, and dwell for paragraphs on irrelevant physical descriptions of characters? Those are bad novels. This is not a fanfic versus original fiction distinction. Those are just characteristics of bad writing. There’s plenty of original fiction (whatever that means given our highly referential culture) that does not do those things, and it kind of makes my heart hurt to think that people believe otherwise. If your experience of non-fanfic fiction is limited to books that do this, I have truly phenomenal news about what awaits you.
*Caveats: (1) There have certainly been eras of literature when opening with ten pages of exposition was more the norm (I’m looking at you, Thomas Hardy)… but in contemporary lit? This is pretty much Thing #1 that any “shopping your novel” blog post will tell you not to do. I am more weirded out every time that post comes up on my dash. (2) This is in no way meant as a put-down of fanfic, which I read and love.
****THANK YOU**** for being that person, I am happy to co-chair “being that person” with you on this.
I’m curious how many people who feel this way are thinking of Hardy. Or like, go a century earlier for PEAK expository writing. No, I did not chose Tom Jones from the dozen titles we were given for English comps in college lol. Maybe people have bad memories of studying 18th and 19th century Western literature in school? I love this stuff but I also spent my academic career studying it—and specifically studying the cultural context in which it was written.
Take my commentary with a grain of salt, because I read a lot of contemporary capital-L literature, but I don’t have a real sense of what’s standard in, say, SF/F. I do see some basic expository writing in YA—not endless pages of it, but often more to go on than in other books I read. But with most non-YA I read, it’s far more common that I’m tossed in blind and have to find my bearings. (You might be frustrated for a bit, until you find your bearings and you feel like a champion.)
Then, one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…you give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore.
Question of Smoke 