Shelf Care: Reviews, Essays, and other Things of Note

• Publishing Triangle announced its finalists for the 35th Annual Triangle Awards!
• In very sad news, Book Depository will be closing at the end of the month. It’s been instrumental for readers eager for books being published internationally, so get those orders in while you can!
  • You can get your copy of the beautiful UK paperback of Our Wives Under The Sea!
  • Might I recommend getting yer mitts on Can I Steal You For a Second? If you’ve ever wanted two girls on The Bachelor or Love Island to fall for each other instead of for some guy with overly whitened teeth, this is the rom com for you!
• Two of my most anticipated are just around the corner and I’m excited as hell: Just As You Are is an Autostraddle-reference-filled “butch 4 gender-confused mess” rom com set at a queer magazine that riffs on Pride & Prejudice, and Robin and Her Misfits is dykes-on-bikes Robin Hood.
• My trivia queen, Amy Schneider of Jeopardy! fame, has a memoir coming out called In the Form of A Question, which was announced on International Trans Day of Visibility and will come out this fall!
• Trashwina Banter’s Blurb of the Week award goes to The Water Outlaws, which is described as “a queer epic fantasy starring bandits of devastating ruthlessness, unseemly femininity, dangerous philosophies, and ungovernable gender who are ready to make history—or tear it apart”. I’m SOLD. This one will be out in August!
• Transmogrify!, an anthology of trans and gender nonconforming fantasy writing from favs like Mason Deaver, will be out this May — but you can enter to win an advance copy on Goodreads right now!
• I got my galley of Lush Lives and it is every bit as beautiful and absorbing as I’d dreamed — I’ll report back once I’m done but I’m telling you to preorder it now!
• A queer black woman rebuilds her life and “reclaims the story housed within her pomegranate-like heart” (what a lovely turn of phrase!) after leaving prison in Helen Elaine Lee’s Pomegranate. It’s out next week and already being likened to Yaa Gyasi and Jesmyn Ward, helloooo 👀

• New Melissa Broder alert! Fans ofMilk Fed and The Pisces will be delighted to know that her next novel, Death Valley, will be coming out this October! Isn’t that cover rad as hell????)
• Next on my TBR —The Weeds has ROCKETED up my list at a rate you won’t believe! Between a mostly-reformed thief in 1854 writing yearning-filled letters to her lady lover, a grad student in 2018, and a plant catalog, this book is billed as “richly rendered historical fiction that also manages to be fresh, subversive, and darkly funny; a novel of love, ghosts, murder, and botany” GHOSTS, MURDER, AND BOTANY???? Take my money. Take it.
• Remember that queer urban fantasy fairytale detective story genre explosion I told y’all about last week? It’s out now! The Winter Knight is a mystery with a delicious Arthurian twist and I’m particularly intrigued by its 90s Vancouver setting!
• “Gleefully anachronistic and spectacularly queer”? Hell yes! Alexis Hall’s latest romance, Something Spectacular, is out next week!
• Mattie Lubchansky, beloved cartoonist at The Nib, has a new graphic novel coming out this June! Boys Weekend is a trans “final girl” horror riff on a bachelor party gone very very awry, told with Lubchansky’s signature sly whimsy. I wanted to shout out one or two of its many rave-review blurbs, but it is literally blurbed by a full roster of my favs so I gave up on trying to choose. Go read the blurbs for yourself and you’ll see what I mean.

• Forget Me Not is a queer YA Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the solo debut of Alyson Derrick, coauthor of She Gets the Girl — this one’s gonna be a big one!
  • Sa’iyda reviewed it for Autostraddle!
  • Publishers Weekly calls it “a textured telling that eschews clichéd interpretations of the belief that love conquers all”
• Lambda finalist Chana Porter returns with The Thick and The Lean, starring “an aspiring chef, a cyberthief, and a kitchen maid” in “a startling fable of the entwined perils of capitalism, body politics, and the stigmas women face for appetites of every kind” – I’m already smitten with this description, which has speculative-horror-Milk Fed vibes, and you can enter the Goodreads giveaway for an early copy here!
• “On the bookshelves, there was plenty of stuff on being gay, and much needed, joyous accounts of what it is to be trans, but nothing really that encapsulates what is it to be both – to exist in the hazy terrain between.” Harry Nicholas’s memoir A Trans Man Walks Into A Gay Bar, out this May, steps into this gap.
• I got the best email in my inbox — Caro Perny, a publicist at Tor, introduced me to The Archive Undying by asking “Dear Yashwina, Do you find yourself craving more giant robots?” WELL NOW I DO! The Archive Undying sounds awesome: giant robots, profound questions, and the tyranny of having a body.
• Fake Dates and Mooncakes is being billed as Heartstopper meets Crazy Rich Asians, and it sounds like such a treat! This YA rom com comes out next month, to savor just in time for summer.
• Jen St Jude’s debut If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come is a YA adventure about queer love at the end of the world, and as a longtime fan of Jen’s writing, I can’t wait to love this one.

• An 18-year-old musician gets her big break in Secret Rules to Being A Rockstar — Tegan & Sara’s bassist, Eva Gardner, calls it ” a colorful story full of hope and wonder, immersing the reader in the near-dystopian dreamscape of the music industry in 1990s Los Angeles — and I know because I lived it.”
  • Want another hit of dreamy LA love? Sizzle Reel, that bisexual-coming-of-age meets Hollywood-behind-the-scenes romance that I mentioned a few months back, is also out next week!
• Kalynn Bayron has written the fun, campy, queer YA slasher of our dreams — I wish I could hop in a time machine and send this one back to baby Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya! You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight is set at a summer camp as a counselor and her girlfriend race to find a killer, and it comes out this June
• Coming this May, acclaimed lesbian horror writer Katrina Monroe combines changeling lore with an incisive critique of the medical-carceral complex for a profound story about postpartum psychosis and generational trauma. It’s been particularly praised for its “staggering empathy, nimble pacing, genuine scares, and riveting central mystery” — an impressive take on a difficult topic!
• The second installment in the Harley Quinn origin trilogy comes out in three weeks!
• First 2024 book in Rainbow Reading — mark your calendars for next January when Gretchen Felker-Martin’s next novel Cuckoo drops!
• Working on a memoir? Krys Malcolm Belc, who wrote The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood, is teaching an eight-week virtual class through Great Place Books specifically “for queer writers who have outlined and/or begun drafting a memoir.”

“Forget Me Notmade me believe fate is real.”

— Sa’iyda on Forget Me Not

Autocorrect: Books content from the last couple weeks at Autostraddle!

• I interviewed Danny Lavery about Dear Prudence!
• Sa’iyda reviewed Forget Me Not!
• Nico interviewed Meg Jones-Wall about Finding the Fool!
• Sa’iyda also reviewedI Will Find You Again!
• Zoe Whittall wrote about femme-ness and book tour outfits!

That’s all she wrote, folks! If you’re a queer writer, particularly an early-career queer writer: I’d love to hear about the cool things you’re up to so that I can share links to your published essays, book reviews, short stories, poems, and longform features on LGBTQ+ topics! Please email me links for consideration at [email protected] with the subject line “Rainbow Reading Submission” — I’m an avid browser-tab-collector, and I especially want to hear from you if you’ve just landed your first publication or first major byline.