Gay Teens in Trucks, Sam and Frodo are Queer, and New LGBTQ Books OUT This Week

Let’s start with the obvious. I mean, the iconic red truck is right there on the cover. As the cover crowded with award stickers indicates, this is a beautiful and unforgettable book–and the sequel is coming out soon! It’s about the unlikely friendship between Ari and Dante and how it evolves over the years, and it’s also about everything Ari is hiding from the world.

While I love this book, I think it’s often recommended without the proper context, so do be prepared going in for violently homophobic and transphobic scenes.

I’m not usually one to choose a movie cover, but I couldn’t resist using the version with them sitting in a truck bed. There’s a kind of book end effect here: the image on the cover is one of the last scenes of the movie, while the book begins with Cam kissing her best friend in the bed of Coley’s truck. It’s a symbol of freedom for these queer teens, but it’s also just a tiny oasis against an often homophobic world. This is my favorite YA book of all time, and it has a similar mix of melancholy and hope as Aristotle and Dante. Content warning for conversion camp.

I can’t believe I didn’t realize until adding the covers to this newsletter that all of these titles have the trucks prominently displayed on them. I am clueless. Lisa Jenn Bigelow’s Starting From Here broke my heart and put it back together again, and it’s another one of my favourite queer YA books. Oddly enough, it’s also about heartbreak and hope–but this one has a dog, so that’s an immediate plus. I deeply want fan art of Ari & Dante, Cam, and Colby all laying in truck beds looking at the stars together. Someone artsy get on that, please.

Gilda is a “twenty-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian” overwhelmed with anxiety and depression. She goes to a church for free counseling, but they mistake her for a job applicant, and she’s too embarrassed to correct them. Now she’s a church receptionist, and she soon finds herself pretending to be Grace–the late receptionist–over email, because she doesn’t want to be the one who has to break the news that she died. Then the police start investigating Grace’s death, and Gilda “may have to finally reveal the truth of her mortifying existence.” This is a funny and touching comedy of errors.

This is the newest book from the author of You Should See Me In a Crown, and it’s another Black sapphic YA novel that should appeal to fans of her previous book–but I read this first, and I loved it! In some ways, it’s a perfect summer read: it takes place at a music festival and has a swoon-worthy romance–but it also tackles gun violence, grief, and sexual harassment. It’s about Olivia, a hopeless romantic fresh off the worst of a string of disastrous breakups, who’s running from the thought of having to face a judiciary hearing of her ex. She does this by convincing her best friend to go to a music festival with her–and this time, she promises, it will be just them: no romances. There, she bumps into Toni, who’s dreading starting university and mourning her father, who died from gun violence. They fall for each other, but it’s not long before things between them and their friends become very complicated.