Author: Kelly Jensen

You’ll have to wait until November for this one to hit shelves, but put it on your TBR and/or preorder now. This collection highlights 30 must-know people who explode the gender binary. It is a groundbreaker in highlighting trans stories, gender nonconforming stories, and intersex stories of real people and real lives.

How bold, bright, and appealing is this one by cover alone? Dive into the world of LGBTQ+ individuals past and present who have shown the world what it is to be who you are.

Among the slate of individuals included are Freddie Mercury, Alexander Wang, Sappho, Audre Lorde, Kristin Stewart, and more.

In addition to highlighting a range of LGBTQ+ trailblazers from past and present, this collection offers essays that focus on the realities of queer life, including mental health challenges, activism, what it is to come out, and more. Again, this one has such an appealing package to it — these collective queer biographies for teens are nothing short of celebratory, even when they take on some tougher stuff.

Take one part Great British Bake Off and one part Magic School, and you get this just-published comic. Porta Bella Magiculinary Academy is all about cooking with magic, and Basil plans to be the top student her senior year. But then in walks Arabella Oregano, daughter of a chef. Immediately, the two begin to grow close. Basil suspects Arabella is keeping a secret though, despite how much they’re working together in order to secure the top rank at school.

So when the secret is spilled, Basil is faced with one of the hardest decisions of her life.

Belle Hawkins is a wallflower and also the person who prefers to be beneath the mascot costume to keep herself at a distance. But it’s senior year and it’s now or never. She decides to remove the head of her costume and proclaim her long-time crush on head cheerleader Regina Moreno.

Problem? Regina has a girlfriend named Chloe Kitagawa.

Chloe is not doing great in English class, though, and Hawkins thinks this is her opportunity: offer to tutor Chloe in order to get closer to Regina. It seems to be going okay, until the moment that Hawkins and Chloe realize they know each other from their youth, when they were both very different people.

There is love here, but…it might be surprising where it happens.

As much as Ari loves making bread, he can’t imagine doing it for the rest of his life. He’s interviewing new potential people to take over is job, and that’s when he meets Hector. Ari begins to train Hector and prepares for his escape from the work, except…he’s starting to fall head over heels for the new guy.

Aiden Navarro is at summer camp before the start of junior high. It’s an intense summer of hanging out with his friends, navigating bullies desperate to make him feel bad about himself as a half Asian boy, and coming to terms with the fact he might be gay.

One night, when Aiden kisses his best friend and campmate, things shift immediately. Has he forever lost the trust of his friend Elias? Did that kiss mean anything romantic? Was it an accident?

This is a moving, heartfelt story and one that will resonate with younger (and older!) teens. It’s about traversing that tricky space between what faith might tell you is right, what it might tell you is a sin, and how you come to accept yourself as you are.

This graphic novel is about a teen witch who helps out at her grandmother’s bookshop, where she often hands out spell books and assists in looking into supernatural occurrences in her small town. During one of those investigations, she stumbles upon her childhood crush and wants to not only rekindle feelings, but also to help him reclaim his power. It’s about family, about the ways history can tie a family and romantic relationship together, and for readers who don’t usually like “horror,” it’s not especially gory. It’s about super-magical powers and spirits.

Xu’s art is perfectly suited to the story, with a wide color palette.

Sixteen-year-old Cade is in the closet because he has to be; he is a Latino living in rural Texas. His escape is horror movies.

This summer, he’s working at a local ranch to help make ends meet at home. He hates it though, save for the two teens who live on that ranch. Especially the very attractive Henry.

The two start to become closer over the summer, but Henry is dodgy about a lot of things, including his mother’s death. Cade worries there might be more that his crush isn’t telling him.

This is inspired by, as you might guess by the title, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. It is romantic and gothic and queer as heck.

When Becca moves to a new, small, posh town, she’s immediately taken in by the popular crowd and ditches the lone fat girl at school who she had a quick connection with (that girl wasn’t cool enough). Soon, Becca learns this elite girl gang has a secret: under the full moon, they transform into werewolves who set out to destroy boys who are too eager to take advantage of girls. All seems well at first, as they plan their attacks outside of Piedmont, but when Becca accidentally destroys the boyfriend of one of her fellow girl gang members, their days are numbered.

This is Mean Girls meets Heathers meets Teen Wolf, and it will become clear why Becca acts as she does. Revenge is best served by teen girls.

Flor, a Latine outlaw, and Grace, a trans runaway, are at the center of this story set in the wild west, where they must team up to put an end to a Confederate plot in New Mexico territory.

Stagecoach theft and heists ensue in this rollicking, wildly queer read.

Kermit knows what it is to grieve. He’s 15, and he’s lost his sister to a car accident and nothing can pause those immense feelings of loss.

When he gets a mysterious invitation at school, signed with a “-1,” he decides to take a chance and show up. It turns out to be a group of students of all backgrounds who’ve lost someone close to them. It’s a supportive space, and it’s one where Kermit begins to find himself and allow himself to get close to Matt. Matt is the only openly gay student at school and his gregarious nature is magnetizing to Kermit.

But as Kermit falls harder, Matt’s truth begins to crack open more and more, potentially putting both of them in danger.

This one is pitched as Thelma and Louise meets Godzilla, y’all. I feel like leaving it at that, but I’ll give you more.

Riley’s parents have divorced and she’s forced to move from Portland, Oregon, to small town Little Brook, Maine. Little Brook is home to Titan Technologies, an international tech lab.

The night of the school’s homecoming game, Riley wakes up to a town on fire and she and her dog plop into their truck to flee town. As they’re leaving, they run into the only other person in town who seems to have survived: Aspen, a classmate that Riley’s been observing (/slash crushing on?). When they get to safety, they realize things are even worse than they seem, and every Titan Tech lab across the eastern seaboard has been attacked.

Riley and Aspen do what makes sense: road trip back to Riley’s hometown of Portland in hopes of safe escape.

But Aspen may not be who she seems…

This is Romeo & Juliet but A WHOLE LOT QUEERER.

Transgender prince Cade is doubling for his brother while also vowing to protect Gael, an infamous boy assassin. Prince Gael plans to destroy Patrick, who is not interested in being heir to a kingdom. Add to the mix Valencia, a dama who attends to the future Eliana queen.

Gael and Valencia are the same person. Valencia, in her battles against Patrick, is actually battling Cade. So when Valencia and Cade are blaming each other for what’s happening with their families, they’re unaware just what is at stake for themselves and the kingdom itself.

Enemy kingdoms + curse breaking + being forced to work together? It sounds like a queerly good/devastating time.

What happens when someone you look up to lets you down by declaring people like you are less than human? That’s a big part of this story, which follows a queer teen named Bobby who wants nothing more than to graduate high school safely.

Bobby’s school is notoriously violent, and he knows that being openly queer would make him the perfect target. This is made more true by the fact is Filipino community does not easily accept people like him. But when he’s outed without permission, Bobby realizes being quiet and unprepared is no longer an option. He turns to take up boxing in order to prepare himself were he to be in a fight.

Bobby looks up to champion Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao. Pacquiao is his inspiration in all ways: he helps Bobby keep going when things get too hard. But then Pacquiao publicly declares that he does not support queer people, leaving Bobby wounded beyond words.

So where does he turn now?

Noah Mitchell is 17 and a gamer (gaymer!). He doesn’t have a whole lot of friends offline, but he’s got a very close one in his gaming community with someone who goes by the identity MagePants69. Noah wants to meet them in person so bad, knowing they’d be true soulmates. Although Noah doesn’t know everything about MagePants69, he’s convinced that MagePants69 is performing at a local community theater. So Noah does what anyone who is smitten would do: sign up to be part of the community theater, even though it is so outside of his comfort zone.

But Noah’s plan to make MagePants69 fall in love? It’s going to be much harder than he thought.

Shireen Malik might be mourning the breakup she’s had with Chris, but it’s not prolonged once she learns that she’s been accepted as a contestant on a new teen baking competition television show. Not only is Shireen stoked for the potential prize money but it’ll also bring attention to her family’s donut shop.

But you know this isn’t going to be easy.

See, Chris is also a contestant on the show.

And Shireen is starting to become close with the good-looking Niamh, first as friends and then as maybe something more.

Can she keep her eyes on the prize and avoid sabotage to win the competition? Or will love take all?

Carpenter and Callen have pulled together a wide array of YA writers, all of whom are sharing fictional stories of people living with mental health challenges. The stories cross genres and experiences, offering everything from a vampire with social anxiety to a teen girl coming to understand her challenges with PMDD. There’s hard stuff here, but there’s also plenty of hope for those who will relate to these experiences.

Shelbi is starting her senior year of high school at a new place in Georgia, Windward Academy. She isn’t really interested in making a lot of friends since she doesn’t plan to be there long and because of her history. She’d rather just…forget about what brought her to this place. But the night the story begins, she gets a text from a wrong number, and while she engages with the texter and learns they’ve been drinking at a party, Shelbi warns them not to drive home.

So when Shelbi is being driven home and goes past a car which has crashed, she begins to think about the texter. And, as we’ll learn, she goes back to the scene of the accident, tying her to the person who was involved in a life-changing way.

Andy Criddle, who is dealing with a host of changes in his family, is drinking again. After his little sister’s death — one he blames himself for — and the loss of his grandfather shortly before, he’s dealing with tremendous grief. Oh, and his mom is running for a political role, wherein she’s pretending to be the biggest right-wing politician out there, on a pro-family, anti-abortion platform. One which she is a hypocrite for advocating, for reasons that will become clear as the story unfolds. 

Soon Shelbi and Andy are connected…and connecting. They’ve been texting each other, mysterious to one another no more. But Shelbi, who has become privy to Andy’s struggle with alcohol, thanks to her learning he was the person behind the accident she saw, is scared to open up to him. To tell him that she, too, struggles with her mental health. That it was her mental health that led her to leaving her life in California for one here in Georgia. When she finally feels ready to tell him, she does so with a list of rules that outline what he can — and cannot — expect from a friendship with her. One of those rules? They cannot fall in love. At all.

This is a story of two very challenged teens who are doing their best to move through their respective days. Both Shelbi and Andy are teens of color, and both struggle with mental illnesses too often underrepresented by people like them in pop culture. Shelbi has bipolar disorder and Andy struggles with substance use. Though both know they could make one another’s issues worse, they also know that when they’re together, they click in untold ways. It is, as Shelbi would describe, something as magical and mysterious as the cosmos. So, too, is their inevitable falling for one another romantically. 

Valerie Chu is a quiet, studious girl, who is obedient to her mother and her father, as well as a dedicated and loyal friend to Jordan, her bestie. The other thing Valerie is — and the thing she is extremely proud of — is thin. Since her earliest recollections, being thin has been prized by her mother, and her mother has monitored her food intake. The book begins with a scene from a birthday party in her youth where Valerie was allowed to blow out the candles on her cake, but she was not allowed to eat a piece herself. The story flashes forward to high school, and while Valerie does eat socially, she follows that up by purging in the bathroom immediately after. Her head is a running calculator on calories. While it’s clear she has a problem, it’s even clearer that her struggles emerged thanks to the toxic culture her mother developed at home.

Now, Valerie is going on a class trip to Paris. She’s thrilled to be there with her best friend Jordan and her crush, Allan. Val tells herself that she’s going to ignore the voices in her head and will instead enjoy the food on the trip. But early in the trip, not only does she give into the voices, but she gets news that utterly rattles her world. Within hours, she’s on a plane back to her home. The food obsession becomes even harder to manage. 

When everyone from school returns back home, Jordan comes to see Val and Val, wrestling with both her eating disorder and grief, learns Jordan and Allan shared a kiss. She’s seething, thinking that Jordan stole her crush — even though Val never once told Jordan about the crush. In her rage and grief, Val tells Jordan she cannot believe someone like her could ever get a boy to pay attention to her.

Jordan, Val’s best friend, is fat. And now, Val has given Jordan one of the cruelest comments imaginable. 

This book is VERY hard to read, but it is a powerful and moving portrayal of bulimia, grief, and the unique pressures that can come from immigrant parents onto their children. The art in this comic is outstanding, with beautiful color work from Lynette Wong in shades of pastel pink, purple, and green.

Meadowlark, Long Island is a place of wealth, luxury, and sophistication. It’s the home of both Chase and Lia, best friends for life, despite being about as different in personality as can be. Chase overachieves and has future CEO all over her. She’s also extremely depressed. Lia is a free spirit, a wanderer, and Chase’s ex-girlfriend. When Lia disappears, Chase is in the spotlight and Chase is determined to find out what happened.

This is a twisty psychological thriller and explores the realities of grief, trauma, and depression.

Love a timeloop story, a la Groundhog Day? You know I do if you’ve been here a minute. Couch delivers that with a mental health focus in his latest.

Clark keeps waking up and reliving the same Monday. This has happened 309 times…but on day 310, suddenly, there is a new boy in his math class. Things are different.

Given this change, Clark decides he’s going to follow Beau on an adventure through their city of Chicago. If he’s not going to have a different day tomorrow, why wouldn’t he try?

What Clark does not account for is starting to fall for the new guy.

This is a book that follows Clark and his experiences of loneliness and what happens when that’s (temporarily?) interrupted.

Whimsy is back in inpatient care after an attempted suicide. This time, she meets Faery, a boy who, too, is in treatment. She is instantly drawn to him for reasons she can’t quite put her finger on. So when she’s released and learns that Faery and his family have moved to her town and they’ll be attending school together, she’s glad to have someone who “gets” her.

What the two of them share, though, beyond their mental challenges is a fear of the Forest near town. But when they enter and realize there is no way out but through, they encounter a host of Sorrows, as well as characters from global fairy and folk tales, who give them guidance on the path toward understanding Sorrow and trauma. 

This is a complex and magical fantasy in verse about mental illness and trauma. McBride offers a rich and challenging world, while trusting readers to understand that the magic will all make sense.

One of my favorite illustrators, Gemma Correll — who did work in my book, including the cover — illustrates this nonfiction resource for teens about mental health. The book is meant to help offer insight into some of the most common mental health challenges, along with basic self-assessments, to help teens figure out where and how to get help.