Author: Patricia Elzie

Our protagonist Pamela lives in a town with a large green space, a park with a small forest, that she is trying to save from being deforested and turned into a shopping mall. She dabbles in a little bio-terrorism and releases some chemicals into the forest that create a toxic gas that is harmful to anyone who goes near. We learn right away that she got the chemicals from her father’s lab.

Her father is a doctor and a very, very controlling and secretive man. They live in a big, dark, dramatic manor, just the two of them, that has really creepy noises. Pamela’s mother is a botanist who is out of town on a research trip. Her father keeps insisting that Pamela help him in his lab with his “research,” which seems really unsettling because it’s not clear what this research is.

Pamela is in high school and seems to have one friend, Alice, though what gets most of Pamela’s attention is the large greenhouse at the high school that was donated by her mother. One of their classmates is Brett, who was Pamela’s homecoming date and a giant piece of garbage. He keeps trying to get Pamela to hook up with him and when she consistently turns him down, he starts rumors. Alice sticks up for Pamela frequently.

Alice and her family had to evacuate their home near the park because of the toxic gas that I mentioned earlier. Alice goes to stay with Pamela and her father in their mansion with all their creepy noises and dark secrets. As you can imagine, it’s hard to keep family secrets with someone else in the home.

I really enjoyed the artwork in this graphic novel and I love the contrast between all the dark, muted colors and then the burst of red that is Pamela’s hair, or the incredibly bright green that shows up from time to time.

Content warnings for an abusive parent and sexual harassment.

Mooncakes is a lovely graphic novel that gives us Asian rep, queer rep, nonbinary rep, and disability rep. Our main characters are Nova and Tam. Nova is a young witch in her late teens. She lives with her grandmas (technically grandma and grandma’s partner). Nova is hard-of-hearing and uses hearing aids which is so rare to see in a graphic novel and wonderful to see on the page.

Nova’s grandmas own a shop called Black Cat Bookseller and Cafe and Nova works there with them. We learn right away that this isn’t just a normal bookstore. A customer comes in and is looking for a particular book so Nova’s grandma asks Nova to show the customer to the back room where they keep the “rare” books. Of course, as soon as they open the door you can tell ah, yes, “rare books” is code for “magical books” because there are definitely books flying around the room and another with teeth and so forth.

Our other main character is Tam. Tam is a werewolf and we learn that they used to live in the same town as Nova and they were friends. But then Tam’s mom and stepdad moved them away. Tam comes back to town for a “mysterious werewolf-centric reason” and Tam and Nova not only rekindle their friendship but a romance as well. Since Nova is a witch and knows a fair bit about magic, she joins Tam in trying to solve the problem that they came back to town for.

In this universe, after a witch graduates high school it’s common for them to move away from their family and deepen their magical education. Nova decided to not move away and to stay with her grandmothers, a decision that weighs heavily on her, especially when her other family visits.

Mooncakes is a story about relationships and not only believing in yourself, but believing in the ones you love and trusting and supporting each other. The artwork is dreamy and warm. This graphic novel is so cute and charming and I really enjoyed it.

Sometimes I pick up a book and start reading without looking at the synopsis. Well, apparently I didn’t even look super closely at the cover of this one because then I would have realized that it heavily involves giant spiders. So there’s my content warning if you, like me, are scared of spiders.

Forest of Souls is the first in a trilogy. It begins with a glossary because this is Fantasy with a capital F. There is some really rich worldbuilding that gets a bit complicated and I definitely had to refer to the glossary a few times. There is the continent of Thiy which has three kingdoms: one of humans, one of shadowblessed, and one of shamans. They all hate each other. Running down the center of the continent is The Dead Wood, a super freaky wood possessed by vengeful souls controlled by a powerful shaman named Ronin.

Sirscha Ashwyn is a teen soldier in training and secretly in training and competition to be the Queen’s Shadow, her master spy and assassin. The Queen considers all shamans to be outlaws and does not allow them in her kingdom unless they are in prison. Shamans each have a particular craft, like a talent, and a familiar. They can work with either fire, earth, wind, water, or light in different ways. You can tell what kind of shaman they are by the intense, bright color of their eyes.

Sirscha and her best friend Saengo are doing a routine assignment with some of the younger recruits when they intercept a message from a fellow trainee named Jonyah, who she hates. Sirscha learns that he is her secret competitor to become the Queen’s Shadow and the message is in their teacher’s handwriting with directions to meet someone at a tea house. Sirscha and Saengo sneak away to try to beat him to the tea house and learn it was an ambush. There were shamans at the tea house and they attacked. Saengo gets stabbed, and Sirscha passes out.

She wakes up at a stream and Saengo is strangely alive even though Sirscha is sure that she saw her die. When Sirscha goes to wash her face in the stream, she finds her eyes have changed color into that of a shaman. While they are out deliberating, they get caught by the Prince, who is captain of the Queen’s Guard. They eventually hear from Ronin, who summons them to go through the Dead Wood and see him. His familiar is a giant spider and that is not even the beginning of the creepiness.

This was such an amazing book to lose myself in and a definitely page-turner.

Our protagonist, Yadriel, lives in a cemetery in Los Angeles with his whole brujx community. He is 16 and should be a full-fledged brujo by now except his community is not supportive because he is transgender and gay. The way that the brujxes think that magic works is that there is men’s magic and women’s magic. So while they’re attempting to be loving, they end up being really transphobic. The person who was his biggest support, his mom, has died but soon it will be the first Día de Muertos since she has died, and Yadriel intends to tell her that he is a brujo now after he sneaks off to do his ceremony in secret.

When a brujx turns 15 they’re presented to Santa Muerte aka Lady Death. She then gives them a blessing and ties their inherent magic to their chosen conduit. For women, it’s usually a rosary. For men, it’s usually a dagger. This conduit is called a portaje. Yadriel’s best friend, Maritza, is super supportive of Yadriel and she makes a beautiful dagger for Yadriel so he can perform his own brujx quince and show everyone that he is just as much of a brujo as any other man. So, he does his secret quince with Maritza and it seems like it works.

Meanwhile, Yadriel’s cousin Miguel dies that same night but they don’t know where his body is. So Yadriel hatches a plan to find Miguel’s portaje and free his spirit and then no one can deny he is a brujo. He and Maritza go poking around and find a necklace, which definitely feels like a spirit is tethered to it. What Yadriel doesn’t expect is that it’s actually the spirit of Julian Diaz, known troublemaker at their high school. Julian wants to make a deal. If Yadriel and Maritza help Julian find his friends and let them know he’s gone, then Julian will let Yadriel sever his tie and set him free to prove to everyone he is a brujo. Seems straightforward, but it really really isn’t. On top of that, spending all that time together, Yadriel isn’t sure he wants to let Julian go.

This book is fun and suspenseful and heartbreaking and heartwarming and I totally have a crush on this book.

This story begins on the East Coast with our two main characters, Patricia and Laurence, as children. We first meet Patricia when she is six. She finds a wounded bird and tries to soothe it by saying she’ll take it home and put it in a cage until it gets better. Much to Patricia’s surprise, the bird speaks up against that and we learn that Patricia can speak to birds. The bird is also very surprised that Patricia can speak to it and tells her she’s probably a witch. The bird tells her who can both fix its wing and figure out if she is a witch, so they set off to find them.

We then meet Laurence, a kid whose parents desperately want him to be outdoorsy and he is very much not. He’d rather be tinkering with his computer and playing video games. He finds some schematics on the internet and builds a clever little piece of tech that I’m not going to tell you the details of because I find it charming and I don’t want to spoil it for you.

Flash forward to when Patricia and Laurence are around thirteen. They meet and Laurence commissions Patricia to help him convince his parents that he’s spending time outdoors and has a friend. When Patricia is at Laurence’s house, he shows her the supercomputer he is building and developing AI. He sets it up so that Patricia can “chat” with it and help the AI develop.

Meanwhile, there is an assassin trying to murder them both because he thinks it will save the world. He ends up separating them from each other. Patricia goes off to a witchcraft school and Laurence goes off to study science.

Their paths cross again in adulthood, now in San Francisco, and their paths continue to cross in the most awkward and mysterious ways. You can feel something building as you read these encounters, but you’re not quite sure what it is.

This book is both fun and funny and one of my favorites to escape into.

Jasmine Mans is a spoken word poet and the book is described as “an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity,” but in my opinion that’s a huge over-simplification. The poems in this book are just so much. So much what? So much everything. So much pain, so much joy, so much passion, so much memory, so much generational trauma, so much community. It’s just so much. I’m amazed I read it as quickly as I did because every few poems I would come across a line or a stanza and I would have to put the book down and stare into space. Or take a walk around our apartment. As if her words made my brain bluescreen and I had to wait for my mind to get back on line.

Some of these poems were very hard to read, not due to complexity but due to the raw emotion. For example, one of the poems is from the point of view of one of the little girls that died in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. The poet also offers many poems as memorials. In honor of Sandra Bland. In honor of Whitney Houston. In honor of the countless Black women mutilated and terrorized by American doctors in the name of science.

There are poems of love and loss and love that lead to loss. And not only romantic love, but love between a mother and daughter, or the love of grandmothers and aunties. There’s a poem titled “Footnotes for Kanye” which I happened to read right after his divorce from Kim Kardashian was announced and though I do not care about Kanye West, this poem hit extra hard when I read it.

I am both changed and seen by this poetry collection and I highly recommend it.

This Stonewall Honor Book is about Charlie, a Black, queer 13-year-old who is guilted by her parents into attending an all-white girls’ Christian youth backpacking camp. When Charlie’s parents drop her off, she is immediately apprehensive that there will be anything that caters to anyone who looks like and believes like her.

The head counselor is Bee and she co-facilitates with her daughter Penny. On top of the subtle micro-aggressions and sometimes clear ignorance on the part of the head camp counselor (and sometimes, even other campers), Charlie is also struggling with her faith in god.

The camp is part of a wider tradition in the area where one of the town colonizers settlers was Beatrice Tillson. Beatrice Tillson is referred to as a feminist who, once a year, would take all the women in the town on a week-long, 50-mile expedition to a place where they created a women-only shrine and they would spend a day of worship and do some kind of special ceremony at that point. What that ceremony entails, exactly, is kept a mystery. This camp that Charlie is at recreates this expedition for teenage girls.

We learn really early on that Charlie is not much of a hiker and on the first day, Charlie is paired up with another camper, Sydney, to be in charge of filling the water supply. In a private moment, Sydney shares with Charlie that she is trans, but no one else at the camp knows. It’s pretty clear that if this information was known, it would probably be even less of a welcoming space. Sydney and Charlie bond over the shared experience of being in a space that was never intended for either of them.

As the Crow Flies is not a complete story and it looks as though the creator is taking a hiatus from updating the webcomic so it’s unclear when more comics and subsequent volumes will be available. Still, I think this story is one worth getting into.

I remember this graphic novel being very popular back when I was in graduate school in the library science program and each time I reread it, it still holds up. For most of the book it seems like there are three different stories being told in alternating chapters that have a similar theme, but at the end it all comes together and you learn the deep interconnection between the stories and the characters.

In one story we meet the Monkey King who is a prominent figure in Chinese mythology and learn how the other deities do not accept him because he is just a monkey. He masters many various disciplines of kung-fu and repeatedly tries to prove himself as a fellow god, even changing his body shape so he is more human-like. But the gods just keep saying, “No, you’re a monkey. Quit trying to be anything other than that.”

The second story being told is that of Jin Wang, a Chinese-American boy who wants to be white and blend in instead of standing out. Part of the reason is because he has a crush on a girl who is white and the other giant part is because of the anti-Asian racism he has to deal with all the time. The microaggressions and flat out aggressions are just a constant onslaught. Two months after Jin arrived at his new middle school, another student arrived. This student, Wei-Chen Sun, just moved to the U.S. from Taiwan. In an effort to reject his own heritage, Jin initially rejects the friendship of Wei-Chen but that doesn’t last for long and they become best friends.

The third storyline of this book is told as if it were a sitcom with a laugh track. It’s about a high school boy named Danny, who appears white, but gets a yearly visit from his cousin Chin-Kee who is a wildly racist caricature of a Chinese person. It’s incredibly awful. It makes me so uncomfortable to even read. Danny is deeply ashamed of his cousin and doesn’t want to be associated with him at all.

This graphic novel expertly explores internalized racism, self-hatred, and eventually self-acceptance and it’s a great read.

This is a young adult romance short story collection of interconnected stories. The premise is that it’s early summer in New York and it’s already very, very hot. There’s a city-wide blackout that simultaneously ruins a bunch of plans and brings a few unexpected couples together.

There are six authors and six stories, though one story is broken up into multiple chapters while all the others are single-chapter stories. That story is “The Long Walk,” by Tiffany D. Jackson and it begins the book as well as has an installment every other chapter. “The Long Walk” starts with Tammi, who is in Harlem turning in her paperwork for a summer internship. Her ex, Kareem, shows up for the same internship. There is confusion but then they are plunged into darkness because of a city-wide Blackout. They are told to go home and return on Monday to sort things out. Since there is a blackout, there are no trains. Turns out they need each other and begrudgingly walk toward home in Brooklyn all the way from Harlem. Kareem has a block party to get to.

“Mask Off” by Nic Stone is a queer M/M romance that takes place through some flashbacks and during the present blackout, where our protagonists, Tremaine and JJ are stuck underground on a subway train that has stopped. These two boys are also on their way to a block party in Brooklyn. JJ is on the basketball team and is definitely not out as queer, which Tremaine is very much the opposite.

“Made to Fit” by Ashley Woodfolk is a queer F/F romance and so incredibly sweet. Nella is a teen in a senior living home visiting her grandfather. The blackout happens and all the residents are in the common area, playing cards. Suddenly, in walks one of the most beautiful girls Nella has ever seen. This girl is Joss and she has a therapy dog named Ziggy that she usually brings to the home on Tuesdays. Shenanigans commence.

Dhonielle Clayton has a really fun story that takes place trespassing in the library during the blackout. Angie Thomas’s story takes place on a double-decker tour bus. Nicola Yoon’s story starts in a rideshare. I love the mix of straight and queer romances. Each time I learned how the characters in the stories are connected to each other, it felt like a little surprise gift.

In the intro, the author tells us that he wants this book to be truthful and that he will be sharing some very heavy things that people don’t necessarily talk about. He went through some very hard things as a child and young adult and likewise, many young adults are going through hard things right now. That is Johnson’s point in telling things truthfully. He wishes that when he was a young adult, he had stories to turn to such as this so he’s hoping that his story can help some young people today. Yes, it’s YA, but it’s a memoir that offers multiple places for connection for a variety of readers.

I would be lying if I didn’t say I was biased, myself a Black & queer person (as is the author). So much of his story resonated with me. His family, like mine, aren’t necessarily academics when it comes to queer history but they were loving always. I couldn’t help but cry every time I read about his close relationship with his grandmother. It’s just so full of unconditional, active love. I found it extra hilarious that he didn’t learn his first name until he was around six because his family and school called him by his middle name because I have the same story.

What I love about this book is that yes, the author tells his story but it is only partly memoir. It is also a manifesto. He starts right off with telling the story of the day he was born and then leaps into how we have gender projected on us as infants or even as fetuses as well as the other societal projections and expectations which, for many people, are way off the mark. He talks about how all of this adds to the struggles of queer kids.

The author shares not only the traumas that can occur as a queer person or a Black person but at the intersection of being Black and queer. This book is such a wonderful addition to the growing collection of queer Black literature.

Content warnings for sexual assault including molestation, homophobia, racism including anti-Blackness, cancer, and death.