Thank you to Carina Press and NetGalley for the eArc of Diamond Ring. All opinions are my own.
There is an entire genre of literature that I've just reThank you to Carina Press and NetGalley for the eArc of Diamond Ring. All opinions are my own.
There is an entire genre of literature that I've just recently realized I love—the sports gays romance. What is a sports gay? Well, it's gays plus sports, usually on the same or opposing team, generally starting off as enemies and eventually evolving from mutual respect to full-on got-the-hots-for-you. I credit graphic novels like Check, Please! to leading me to read all of Rachel Reid books, and from there I've even dabbled in soccer romance.
But baseball? I didn't think it existed. Even though baseball, with those men in tight, tight pants swinging a big-old stick and handling a ball, seems pretty gay when you think about it, I hadn't yet stumbled across a sports gay book with baseball in it. And baseball? Baseball is my sport. And gays are my reading genre. (I'm not fetishizing, honestly—I'm a queer ELA teacher with a penchant for romance novels.)
So imagine my delight when Diamond Ring came onto my radar. Some of my favorite Bookstagrammers were drooling over it, and I thought, why not? And oh boy, am I glad I did. This book...this book. It's sweet. It's sporty (about an actual sport I can actually tolerate, no less), It drips with that delicious kind of tension between the two main characters we love. These two main characters instantly slid into my heart: Jake, the sunshine, and Alex, the grump, not rivals exactly, but also not particularly compatible on the surface, but they each bring out the best in each other as they ride out the rollercoaster of their rookie season together.
Enter disasters of the sports and personal nature, many interceding and miserable years for both of them, and suddenly our two boys, now hardened men, find themselves back on the same team where it all began. But they've changed. Matured. Life has happened. They each have to ask themselves what it is they want, whether the dreams they've been pursuing their entire adult lives are worth the payoff. The journey to find the answers to these questions is at times heartbreaking. Both men are so beautifully written to be vulnerable and imperfect. Each has their baggage. Each has had their hearts tossed around and find it hard to trust themselves or others.
KD Casey has hit a home run with Diamond Ring (I'M SO SORRY I COULDN'T HELP IT!!). I am so excited to go back and read her other books from this series (note: you can read this one as a standalone).
Merged review:
Thank you to Carina Press and NetGalley for the eArc of Diamond Ring. All opinions are my own.
There is an entire genre of literature that I've just recently realized I love—the sports gays romance. What is a sports gay? Well, it's gays plus sports, usually on the same or opposing team, generally starting off as enemies and eventually evolving from mutual respect to full-on got-the-hots-for-you. I credit graphic novels like Check, Please! to leading me to read all of Rachel Reid books, and from there I've even dabbled in soccer romance.
But baseball? I didn't think it existed. Even though baseball, with those men in tight, tight pants swinging a big-old stick and handling a ball, seems pretty gay when you think about it, I hadn't yet stumbled across a sports gay book with baseball in it. And baseball? Baseball is my sport. And gays are my reading genre. (I'm not fetishizing, honestly—I'm a queer ELA teacher with a penchant for romance novels.)
So imagine my delight when Diamond Ring came onto my radar. Some of my favorite Bookstagrammers were drooling over it, and I thought, why not? And oh boy, am I glad I did. This book...this book. It's sweet. It's sporty (about an actual sport I can actually tolerate, no less), It drips with that delicious kind of tension between the two main characters we love. These two main characters instantly slid into my heart: Jake, the sunshine, and Alex, the grump, not rivals exactly, but also not particularly compatible on the surface, but they each bring out the best in each other as they ride out the rollercoaster of their rookie season together.
Enter disasters of the sports and personal nature, many interceding and miserable years for both of them, and suddenly our two boys, now hardened men, find themselves back on the same team where it all began. But they've changed. Matured. Life has happened. They each have to ask themselves what it is they want, whether the dreams they've been pursuing their entire adult lives are worth the payoff. The journey to find the answers to these questions is at times heartbreaking. Both men are so beautifully written to be vulnerable and imperfect. Each has their baggage. Each has had their hearts tossed around and find it hard to trust themselves or others.
KD Casey has hit a home run with Diamond Ring (I'M SO SORRY I COULDN'T HELP IT!!). I am so excited to go back and read her other books from this series (note: you can read this one as a standalone)....more
Thank you to Dial Press and NetGalley for the eArc of The Prospects. All opinions are my own.
When I say I am not a sports gay, I really mean it—I don'Thank you to Dial Press and NetGalley for the eArc of The Prospects. All opinions are my own.
When I say I am not a sports gay, I really mean it—I don't watch much sportsball (not even women's basketball! I know!), but baseball? Baseball is something that I've grown to love over the years, mostly because my son plays and my grandfathers both loved the game. Somehow, though, I've found myself enjoying several sports gays books about all sorts of balls: soccer, hockey (yeah, yeah, I know they use pucks, just go with it), and now, happily, baseball! The Prospects encapsulates everything we love about sports: the eternal hope of a win. In baseball, with its long seasons and storied teams and entrenched system and tradition of calling up players from minor to major leagues, this hope is an important part of the game. The plucky lead of The Prospects, Gene Ionescu, oozes that hope. And his hope has paid off. He's a trans man playing professional baseball in the starting lineup for his beloved minor league tea m Beaverton Beavers; he has a supportive family and team; and he has a coach who, for the most part, gets him. But then, as we all know how the rom-com trope happily goes, someone has to come and mess it all up and show us that maybe, just maybe, Gene has some growing to do, not just as a player, but as a human, too. Thanks to his sort-of on-field nemesis Luis Estrada, Gene learns how to be humble, how to work even harder than he thought possible and, most importantly, he learns that he deserves to want—and expect—great things for himself.
The Prospects is the perfect book for baseball season or as a fun summer read. Hoffman lovingly describes the best aspects of the game, so much so that I truly found myself out there on the field with the Beavers. He also shows trans love and bodies and sex in the most tender, respectful, and loving way possible. Go root, root, root for the home team and read The Prospects!...more
Thank you to Wednesday Books and NetGalley for the eArc of This Day Changes Everything. All opinions are my own.
I really liked Edward Underhill's debuThank you to Wednesday Books and NetGalley for the eArc of This Day Changes Everything. All opinions are my own.
I really liked Edward Underhill's debut queer YA novel Always the Almost, so I was excited when he came out with a new one. And this one, I have to say, is even better. His writing style, storytelling, and craft all seem more polished in his sophomore effort. This fun book, about an accidental day out and about in New York City, was fun, clearly well-researched (as a former New Yorker, I loved reading all the descriptions of the places the characters visit!), and more importantly, more than just an "Oops, we got stuck together!" rom-com trope.
Our two main characters, strangers Abby and Leo, two teenagers traveling to NYC from afar to perform at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with their respective marching bands, find themselves accidentally flung together when each of them get on the same subway car going in the wrong direction from their tour groups. After a series of very grumpy interactions, where the two seem like they're going to split up and resign themselves to being lost and alone in New York for the rest of the day, they reluctantly agree to work together to find Abby's crush some special gifts and make their way back to their school groups. If this is how band kids rebel, I'm all for it. Of course, getting lost in a city of 8 million people is no joke, and the way they had such awareness of how the adults would react should they find out is very much real.
Of course, knowing this is set up as a queer YA rom-com, we can guess what happens. But it's still sweet, beautiful, innocent, because the book is not just about getting lost in New York, but about finding new ways to be yourself around others, exploring and accepting your queer identity and finding your people who accept you, too....more
Thank you to NetGalley and Katherine Tegan books for the eARC of Charming Young Man. All opinions are my own.
If you love the Moulin Rouge-era of PariThank you to NetGalley and Katherine Tegan books for the eARC of Charming Young Man. All opinions are my own.
If you love the Moulin Rouge-era of Paris, the lushness of rich Parisians, the hard truth of the life of the underclasses, and just the general artistic mayhem all of that setting conjures, Charming Young Man by Eliot Schrefer is probably your book. It is the story of a down-and-out pianist trying to socially climb his way into the favor of the upper class. Along the way he confronts truths about himself and his own life, and whether living genuinely is worth the risks and the sacrifices.
This novel is a lot of fun for history and literary history nerds. None other than Marcel Proust, the madeleine lover himself, plays a prominent role in Leon's up and coming place in Parisian high society, alongside such luminaries as actress Sarah Bernhardt and painter John Singer Sargent (one of my personal favorite characters in the book and painters in real life). The prose is engaging (I think I read it in two days!), and you can't help but be invested in the story of Leon, a poor piano prodigy looking for a patron to secure funding for the rest of his musical education. The reader feels like they're getting their own glimpse into the lives of Paris's rich and famous at the fin de siecle, a time period known for its rich artistic, cultural, and political movements.
I thought that Schrefer's name was familiar, and then I realized that he wrote another incredible book that centers around a queer love story but could not be more different from this one, The Darkness Outside Us and I was actually shook. Sci-fi and historical fiction? This is talent.
If you love queer historical fiction, give this one a read....more
Thank you to NetGalley and Feiwel & Friends for the eArc of Teach the Torches to Burn: A Romeo & Juliet Remix. All opinions are my own.
I have been anThank you to NetGalley and Feiwel & Friends for the eArc of Teach the Torches to Burn: A Romeo & Juliet Remix. All opinions are my own.
I have been an English teacher for 20 years, and probably about 17 of those have taught Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet at least twice a year for all those years. One of my stupid human tricks is that you can read nearly any line from R&J to me and I can tell you the act and the scene that it comes from. So obviously I know this play inside and out.
Nervous as I was to read this book, I was utterly delighted by this queer remix of R&J. Caleb Roehrig took all the best qualities of the characters and instead of making them their fatal flaws, turned them into something that made them acutely likable and terribly human. Even though Romeo and Juliet, Tybalt and Benvolio, Friar Laurence and Lords and Ladies Capulet/Montague all appear in this book, they do not necessarily play similar roles. While Tybalt is still the unlikable aggressor, Juliet is independent and actually gets to express her own thoughts, Friar Laurence, though still the "responsible adult" Romeo most trusts, actually gives good advice, and Benvolio is footloose and fancy free, much more a Mercutio than Mercutio actually is. And of course there's the original character Valentine, Mercutio's brother, who catches Romeo's attention one night in—where else?—an orchard, of course. And our star-crossed lovers' journey goes from there.
Roehrig clearly knows the play well; he took many of the familiar trappings of the setting and conflict and tipped them just slightly, shook them up just enough that the core elements of the play remained while slotting both new and old characters into different roles. Seeing a queer love story play out while in the presence of some of my favorite Shakespeare characters was satisfying in a way I didn't think I needed.
I can picture my students making a beeline for this novel after we finish reading Romeo and Juliet, especially the students who generally lack representation in 400-year-old pieces of literature....more
Thank you to NetGalley and Europa Editions for the eARC of Mrs. S. All opinions are my own.
There's a line in Lolita where the narrator says of Lolita,Thank you to NetGalley and Europa Editions for the eARC of Mrs. S. All opinions are my own.
There's a line in Lolita where the narrator says of Lolita, the object of his obsession, that she was "safely solipsized." I kind of feel like I am, too, after reading K Patrick's debut novel Mrs. S. In this interior storytelling, the reader is a helpless victim to the unnamed narrator's perspective. Every single thing except Mr. and Mrs. S, the headmaster and headmaster's wife of an elite girl's English boarding school, go unnamed. There's "the Girls," "the Headmistress," "the Nurse," and, her ghost ever-looming over everyone, "the dead author," a famous alumna of the school. What we do know—the narrator is a woman uncomfortable with her assigned-at-birth gender, Australian, young, and gay—is given to us in dribs and drabs, since we are bounced around the narrator's brain like a pinball for most of the novel, on board for the tumultuous ride of her emotions, self-talk, and view of the unfamiliar world around her.
The story is luscious, sensuous, and claustrophobic. The narrator fixates on the named Mrs. S, the headmaster's wife who has also taken a keen interest in her. The two grow closer, and as they do, the narrator grows nearly obsessive.
The prose is beautiful, but as beautiful as it is, this book was challenging to read. Not only is everyone generically unnamed, but there are no quotation marks or dialogue markers—the reader must pay absolute attention to context and infer when the speaker has changed, who says what, just another way that we are sucked into the interior world of the narrator.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. It was drenched in sexuality and sex, passion and attraction. Just be ready to read it when you're not half-asleep, because otherwise you'll probably miss half of what is going on....more
Thank you to Macmillan and NetGalley for the eARC of Dykette. All opinions are my own.
I really don't know how to explain Dykette. To say it will only Thank you to Macmillan and NetGalley for the eARC of Dykette. All opinions are my own.
I really don't know how to explain Dykette. To say it will only land with a queer audience sounds rude and gatekeeping-ish, but I think it's just a matter of fact that most of the drama in this book, which is queer to the point of performative satire, can only be truly and deeply understood by a queer audience.
Sasha and Jesse are two young dykes—and although Jesse is consistently referred to as Sasha's boyfriend, his gender identity is never fully explained. They find themselves invited to the country home of two semi-famous lesbians, one from the news media (not-so-subtly Rachel Maddow-esque) and one a psychologist famous for her podcast, Jules and Miranda. Add to this Jesse's friend Lou and their partner Darcy, a social media star, and let the queer drama begin.
Sasha seems like a jealous hanger-onner for most of this book—excited by yet contemptuous of others' fame and her proximity to it, jealous when people besides her get attention, and insecure about her bonafides as a queer person (hence her naming herself a "dykette," for she is not yet a full-fledged dyke). Her only true companion seems to be her dog, a constant presence in the book, who is overfed and treated like a small child.
Truly, pretty much every character in this book is rather unlikable. I'm not sure what Davis is trying to say about queerness: that at its core, it's all about insecurity? That it's only valid when it exists as a performance for other people to consume? Or that all queer people are dysfunctional because of misogyny and homophobia (societal and internalized). At any rate, there wasn't much I found funny about this book, although it's lauded for its comedic social commentary. I have to assume this book was written with a great, heaping dash of irony on Davis's part, and if you can read it as just that—a text which skewers the hyper-sexual, social media servitude, attention-getting antic stereotypes of gay culture—then sit back and enjoy the show....more
Thank you to Wednesday Books and NetGalley for the eARC of Darkhearts. All opinions are my own.
First and foremost, Darkhearts. is a delicious little Thank you to Wednesday Books and NetGalley for the eARC of Darkhearts. All opinions are my own.
First and foremost, Darkhearts. is a delicious little read. I gobbled it up in about 2 days flat. The writing is very catchy, as is the storyline—a hometown reunion between two former bandmates at the funeral of their mutual friend. Our protagonist is David, otherwise known as the one who walked away—from a budding musical career, only for the remaining two bandmates, Eli and Chance, to go on to worldwide fame in the band David left behind. When Eli dies unexpectedly, Chance and David reconnect, and feelings that have long been festering under the surface boil over in surprising ways.
I love an unsure gay in a YA book, and that's exactly what we see here—both David and Chance's sexualities remain undefined throughout the book, and I really liked it that way. However, as much as this really should have been the main problem, it wasn't. Instead, the problem is David needing to face down his own abandonment and jealousy issues and decide whether he can live in a world with Chance being one way to the world, one way with him, or continue to rage at him from a distance.
Overall, this was a great read. The relationship between David and Chance had enough chemistry to be believable, but it wasn't a seething cauldron or anything (until they get together—then it's kind of whoa). I think the only thing that felt a bit off was how little time each of them spent mourning Eli, especially chance. Eli was Chance's bandmate. It seems like he would have been mourning far longer than it seems he does in the book.
Overall, I enjoyed this "boy in a band" book. It landed with me where others of this genre hadn't....more
Thank you to Wednesday Books and NetGalley for this eARC of Ander & Santi Were Here. All opinions are my own.
When a book makes me cry, I automaticallyThank you to Wednesday Books and NetGalley for this eARC of Ander & Santi Were Here. All opinions are my own.
When a book makes me cry, I automatically give it five stars, but I honestly wouldn't even have to think twice about giving Ander & Santi Were Here by Jonny Garza Villa five stars even without the waterworks because it is just that beautiful.
The book is about Ander "AJ" Martinez, a nonbinary artist on a bit of sabbatical after deferring from a prestigious art school for a year to focus on what they're best at—painting murals in their South Texas border town community. Their Mexican-American family, who runs a popular local restaurant, is supportive of Ander in all the ways: of their career, their choice to take year off, of their nonbinary identity. I absolutely adore how Villa creates a supportive family for Ander, one who uses their pronouns with authority and figures out how to change the gendered language of Spanish to work. It was a joy to see this, and to see that yes, it is possible to be supportive of all identities in all languages.
The character of Santi was beautifully rendered as well. He's guarded yet open, curious about being with Ander, yet holding him at arm's length until he finally can't take it anymore. Santi's precarious position as an undocumented immigrant puts both him the entire Martinez family in danger and creates tense moments of suspense throughout the book. I felt like I couldn't feel the bottom of my stomach at some points. Villa has such a way of allowing us to feel empathy for Santi and everyone else who cares about him.
If you've never once thought about what a day in the life of an undocumented worker is like, please read this book. Not only is it a love story to beauty, through Ander's murals and art, but to loyalty, love, and devotion. Ander & Santi Were Here will make your heart swell, hurt, and smile at the same time....more
Thank you to Wednesday Books (and Rivka Holler for keeping me on their email blasts whenever an amazing new book is coming out!) and NetGalley for thiThank you to Wednesday Books (and Rivka Holler for keeping me on their email blasts whenever an amazing new book is coming out!) and NetGalley for this eArc of Gwen and Art are Not in Love. All opinions are my own.
Firstly, happy Pub Day (in the UK), Lex! Congrats on another amazingly fun romp!
Since I've enjoyed all of Lex Croucher's other books, I was anticipating that this one would be equally as fun a time, and I was right! If anything, I think I had even more fun reading this book than her two previous titles Reputation and Infamous (although I certainly enjoyed both). I loved seeing Croucher's same sense of storytelling, humor, and heart applied to younger characters. Although the experience of having to get married young and inheriting the crown to a kingdom aren't exactly common occurrences for most young adults, I think most teens can relate to the heavy weight of expectations and the shame that comes along with the realization that you will never be able to meet them. And, of course, it wouldn't be a good YA book with that journey of self-discovery, of finding who you really are and what (and who) you really want, and it was pure joy seeing each of the four main characters, Gwen, Art, Gabriel, and Bridget, grow into who they were meant to be.
The titular Gwen and Art aren't who you think they're going to be, the namesake of the Arthurian legends, King Arthur and Guinevere. Rather, Gwen and Art are two teens, many generations removed from their magical namesakes—one a princess, one a boy from a well-to-do family and an overbearing, conniving father who just happens to be betrothed to said princess. The problem? They hate each other. A lot. And yet, the expectation that they'll be married remains with nothing to do for it. What follows is, I would say, generally a comedy of errors a la Shakespeare as the two betrothed make discoveries about who and what they really want, culminating in some real feels and some serious medieval fighting action scenes (which I had no idea I would enjoy as much as I did).
I have literally three students doing research papers on medieval warfare and armor at the moment, all of them serious readers, and I can't wait to recommend this book to them!...more
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