Best Queer Fantasy I’ve Read the Past Year

I’ve read so few books this year and am in the middle of exam season, but I always know pride month is around the corner from the increased interest in my queer book posts. That said, there’s always this difference, if a somewhat diffuse one, between great fantasy book with some queer characters and great queer fantasy. This list has a bit of both.

City of Strife by Claudie Arseneault

This was a book I reread this year, because it’s so unique in what it manages to do as a high fantasy. All the characters are queer; bisexual, demi, pan, poly, gender fluid, agender, asexual, aromantic is all represented in an overall ruthless and amazing magical city. I might have a big weakness for main characters who take the time to observe the world around them, is a thief or assassin, but also cares deeply for their friends and features platonic love. It’s politics, merchant families, rivalry. The plot builds so naturally on the personalities and choices made by these characters and their lives intertwining by living in the same city. It has quite the list of trigger warnings though, so be careful to check those. It is quite the ruthless city, which makes the constant focus on characters interacting with each other and the reality of the place so special.

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas

I really would have loved this book as a middle school kid (or even younger actually). It’s a queer romance between a Latino trans boy and a gay boy, featuring murder mystery and ghosts. It’s fast-paced, funny, cute and dramatic, with a somewhat predictable plot which is why I don’t really think it fits into the older end of YA as it was marketed as.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

The tagline for this book seems to be lesbian necromancers in space, which would be correct. It’s very much a love it or hate it type of book, because you’re thrown into the plot and have to start paddling to keep up with the characters. It does a great job turning into an unusual fantasy book even though it’s set in a fairly usual setting of deadly competition. The writing and character personalities are fantastic, as well as the well-hidden system behind the magic – not to forget the enemies to lovers (maybe) of the main characters.

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

It’s a great fantasy book where the main character is sapphic and has a crush on a brilliant assistant she meets. It has thieves, heists, magical technology, Merchant Houses that controls the city and has created capitalist monopolies. The writing is very straight-forward for this type of book, and makes it very accessible and an easy read despite being high-fantasy and having great world-building.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

Baru’s island is taken over and controlled under an empire that believes heavily in eugenics, ruthlessly changing the society as they see fit (including forcing queer couples apart) and placing the kids in terrifying boarding schools. And Baru plays the waiting game for revenge for her family which they murdered, as the colonizers clothe her and educate her in what they see fitting. Definitely a brutal fantasy, but more so in the cultural impact and strategies than the wars of high fantasy. It’s very much debating morality of if ends justify means, as Baru gets more ruthless and morally-gray in trying to achieve revenge. It’s a book about not losing yourself and, despite being “othered”, Baru always reconnecting with where she is from, with the fact that she’s a lesbian being a big part of that.

Silver in the Wood (Greenhollow Duology #1) by Emily Tesh

I was a bit unsure about this book while reading it, but I’ve been thinking about the vibes of this book since reading it. It has this cottagecore, forest aesthetic that really has a grip on me, with stories of the Wild Man of Greenhollow and the secret-folklorist that comes upon him. It’s short (112 pages) and manages to deliver on the fairytale-ish forest, magical realism vibes in the writing, but plot-wise, character-wise, etc. it does come up short to me. The m/m relationship and yearning could’ve been better as I didn’t quite feel it delivered on its potential, but it was worth the read looking back.

Mask of Shadows by Linsey Miller

I very much feel like this is the queer & way better version of Throne of Glass with its deadly auditions to become the Queen’s new assassin. What was a pleasant surprise was how the protagonist never was very vicious in their thought-process or tried to defend their actions, their reasoning behind taking lives were very business-like and unapologetic. The protagonist Sallot is gender-fluid using she and they pronouns based on how they present. Despite having a good start-point, the fantasy built on somewhat cheesy and typical fantasy plotlines that makes it very much YA fantasy, lacing in world-building or description and it’s a bit half-finished type of book.

This book brings me to a dilemma because it personally felt similiar vibes to “Ship of Smoke and Steel” by Sjango Wexler in the protagonist’s voice. But that book handled the queer aspect a lot worse including just not writing good female characters, while having a more interesting world powered by magic. So while Miller’s book wasn’t the best fantasy book I’ve read, I would rather recommend Miller’s book than Wexler’s.

Honorary mention to the (mainly) horror podcast “The Magnus Archive” which in their last season has an asexual relationship between two guys.

City of Strife by Claudie Arseneault | Review

Pages: 375

Genre: high fantasy, lgbt

TW for the book (from author): “abuse (physical, emotional, mind control — seriously, if depictions of abuse trigger you, please be very careful when approaching this novel/avoid it.), torture, homelessness, child abandonment, police brutality, racism, family death, memory loss, death by fire (mention) and hanging.”

My thoughts

I went into this book with little expectation or knowledge outside of it being a lesser-known fantasy book with many queer characters. All that was very true! All the characters are queer; bisexual, demi, pan, poly, gender fluid, agender, asexual, aromantic is all represented in an overall ruthless and amazing magical city. It is also a very ethnically diverse group. I just found out the author is the person behind the “Aro ace database” and it’s ownvoices for aro-ace.

The writing caught me from the very beginning;

Arathiel had grown tired—tired of not feeling rough wood under his hand, tired of not smelling the salty sea or earthy autumn air, tired of not tasting even allegedly spicy meals. Tired of being alone, a shadow, always one step removed from the world. One day, he would need to face his family.

I might have a big weakness for main characters who take the time to observe the world around them, is a thief or assassin, but also cares deeply for their friends. Also in general I find that there is way too little focus on platonic love, friends and friends as found-family in fantasy and young adult books (which is what I mainly read when it comes to fiction). And this book truly had all of those things, to the point where the few boring parts where the pacing gets a bit too slow is overshadowed by the good and unique elements for me. This book just gave me a lovely, fun and exciting experience reading it with characters I squeal over, but also feel comforted by. Without sacrificing any of the heavyness or high fantasy elements usual to the genre.

Tonight, however, he had a more mundane activity in mind: a game of cards with the two precious friends he’d managed to make. Way more stressful than sneaking into an inhabited building during the day, locating his target, and slitting his throat before anyone noticed him. Not to mention, Cal wanted to invite a new player today. Worse, he wanted Hasryan to do it.

Fantasy centered in a city and its politics with merchant families and rivalry, it’s just great. It highlights the many tough, quick choices characters have to make, magic making everything more complicated somehow as well. And the plot builds so naturally on the personalities and choices made by these characters and their lives intertwining by living in the same city. It’s not a very extended world-building and I think here’s where the fantasy book would’ve had more potential to build on. There is very many characters to keep track on through multiple POVs, but personally it was okay, even if a bit difficult to understand or relate to all of them just by the sheer amount. It is just a book that tries (and succeeds) to do a lot in under 400 pages. The morally gray aro-ace wizard-in-training Nevian is suffering under an abusive mentor. Arathiel is a mood, as they say, as he’s been gone from the city for 130 years after disappearing while looking for a cure for his ill sister. He’s back to a completely changed city and deciding on whether to claim his right as a noble or keep this anonymous new identity as the keeper of a homeless shelter of sorts. And I loved Cal of course. I’ve highlighted too many quotes of him talking about cheese to not love that character.

Cal climbed into it, then stared at Larryn, his legs dangling. Expecting something. Larryn cleared his throat, hurried to his pantry, and retrieved several types of cheese from it. He had bought so many yesterday, and it would be delusional not to admit guilt had played a big part in it. He had no intention of cooking with this

This will be a book I return to reread and I need to get a physical copy as well. And I’ve yet to read the next book, which I’m excited for! I always need more personality-driven fantasy books with lots of politics in my life, but especially when they have such a queer cast and focus on friendship and found families.

The Recommendations | Book Tag

I’ve been tagged by both Ally Writes Things, who made the tag, and Naty’s Bookshelf. Thank you!!

Rules

• Tag Ally @ Ally Writes Things 
• Give at least one recommendation for each of the prompts below
• If you don’t have a recommendation, talk about a book you want to read
• Tag your friends

A book about friendship

I always look for books about friendship, but somehow all the recommendations I have is heist related? That’s without including all the YA books with too-young characters having to bond because there’s no adults around, of course. Honestly I prefer found-family or platonic relationships to romantic ones in general in books.

But I think of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt as a story about friendship, as much as it has lonely elements as well. I guess also “The Secret History”. I need more not-gloomy-murder recommendations, is what I’m figuring out.

A translated book

Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. For once I’m standing by my first language and choosing a norwegian book. I know this book that’s a mix of children’s and philosophy is really well-known, but it’s kind of strange trying to get if people know of it elsewhere in the world. I grew up with the author’s book, but I really want to reread this and see how (or if) different I would understand it now. It’s philosophy made so accessible, even for someone who is forced to take a university philosophy course right now and hating it.

A diverse romance

I’m so bad at reading pure romance books without stopping half-way through. I just finished Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas and while it felt very middle-school and not young adult, it’s the queer romance between a Latino trans boy and a gay boy that I would’ve loved growing up.

A fast-paced book

I rarely remember the pace of a book unless it was horrible one way or another?? I think the sequel A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green had a fast pace in that the set-up of the first book (with strange giant robots that might be alien) needed a lot to tie up and it all managed to happen in this book, through multiple points of view and a group of friends collaborating by working on each of their part of the bigger problem.

A nonfiction (not memoir)

Naty’s Bookshelf mentioned The End of Everything by Katie Mack which I just read and very much agree with her take! It was such an experience reading, written with so much passion about astrophysics and the existential questions. In that way it does have a lot of perspective and personality from Mack and even though I am in university for physics, you don’t need any background to enjoy reading it. She goes briefly through the smaller things you need to follow the theories of how the world will end and what that means.

An underrated memoir

A truly underrated one is “A Woman in the Polar Night” by Christiane Ritter about a german upper-class (or at least comfortable) woman who in 1934 travels to the Arctic to spend a year there. It goes very quickly from “ah, a relaxing, but challenging trip” to “boredom and life & death”. Her writing is stunning as well and really delves into aspects of life that I’ve never had described to me this way, but rings as clear as the snow surrounding her for miles and miles.

A book with fewer than 10.000 ratings on Goodreads

Somehow the first I thought of was (Don’t You) Forget About Me by Kate Karyus Quinn, which was one of those books that was on my TBR for FIVE LONG YEARS with no idea of what it was about. It had such a powerful story of facing reality and dealing with it or continuing making the easy decision of running from it. As a story it’s also on the line between fantasy, magical realism and dystopia in a way I haven’t seen before, set in a “paradise” where no one ever get sick or seem to die. It’s currently at 2171 ratings.

A book with a LGTBQ+ protagonist

I just bought City of Strife by Claudie Arseneault in physical form as I loved it so much and wanted to reread it before reading the rest of this high fantasy series. It has several asexual characters, including the main character (who is also aromantic) and is written by an asexual and aromantic author. All the characters are queer; bisexual, demi, pan, poly, gender fluid, agender, as well as asexual and aromantic is all represented in an overall badass magical city. Really, this book should be underneath the ‘friends’ recommendation as well as I might have a big weakness for main characters who observes everything all the time as a thief or assassin, but also cares deeply for their friends. And the plot builds so naturally on the personalities and choices made by these characters, and the way their lives intertwines by living in the same city. This book just gave me a lovely, fun and exciting experience reading it with characters I squeal over, but also feel comforted by. Without sacrificing any of the heavyness or high fantasy elements usual to the genre.

A book by a trans or non-binary author

I’ve got so many books I want to read that fits here, so these are on my TBR (and hopefully I can get to them after exams):

Freshwater, Pet or basically any other book by Akwaeke Emezi. I’m really interested in how Freshwater protrays mental illness , identity and the protagonist develops separate selves within her as she moves from Nigeria to America for college. But it all in this magical realism/fantasy type of story. Pet is also magical realism/fantasy for somewhat of a younger audience centered around a black, transgender girl who meets a monster and all the adults around her are in denial of their existence.

If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo also has a transgender girl main character who deals with being new in high school and everything that comes with. Relationships, mental illness, conflicts around gender – it seems like a really honest book.

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A book with more than 500 pages

The longest book I’ve read and enjoyed is apparently now the popular fanfic All The Young Dudes by MsKingBean89 with its 527k words. And while I do recommend it for all its glorious scenarios as the whole fanfic follows the Harry Potter Marauders through Hogwarts and until the end, giving you everything queer J. K. FUcking Rowling would never – don’t start reading it without having the next few days completely free. The platonic relationships and the different twist on Remus’ character and life all wrecked me.

Besides that, it’s The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson which is one of my favourite fantasy books of all time and also 1283 pages long. It’s a struggle of wanting to write reviews for all my fav books, but then also having too much to say about them and never getting to it. It’s just the best, although I always recommend Mistborn by Sanderson if you’re looking for an easier way into his work and not to dive into this epic fantasy chaos of greatness as it has as much of same brilliant elements in an easier to digest format and size.

A short story collection

Both The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu are supreme. Just the paper menagerie collection has stories about “The bookmaking habit of select species”, an AI utopia that you might actually want to live in, hujing; beings who are both fox and human, chinese calligraphy and deadly fear of communism / plain racism, being chinese in america, simulacrums; illusions of people stuck in time, aliens, Guan Yu the chinese god of war visiting America (American Gods vibes from that one, it was awesome). Also immense sacrifices and a few stories that willl make you sob inclung about unit 731 and the biological warfare and experimentation in China during WW2.

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A book you want everyone to read

In general, the books that had the most impact on me heavily depends on the situation and context in which I read it. Not to mention my on-going struggle of finding a general recommendations list for people in my real life who ask. Because it’s always so much better to tailor them to their interest and like level of understanding of any given genre. For example the already mentioned A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter I find myself automatically recommending, but I get that it will be a slow-paced and quite boring book if it doesn’t match with the person.

So I think the best answer is the poetry collection BRANCHES and the new release Grocery List Poems (when it comes out in june, I’ve yet to read it) by Rhiannon McGavin! The writing is easy to follow for those who “aren’t (yet) into poetry”, but I also think McGavin always brings really interesting takes and beautiful writing. She started out as a spoken word poet so a lot of her work is on youtube. I’ve followed her for years, but in general I find that among the younger poets those who already stands out in how clearly they follow their own, more unique path is the ones that grows the most. Of course, easiest way to get into poetry is to start out with someone that speaks about things you are interested in, which sounds obvious, but sometimes needs a reminder.

Yesika Salgado (with the collections Corazón, Tesoro and Hermosa) is another great recommendation for a poet to ‘start with’, but also in general really fantastic. I’ve been rereading the poetry collections and wanted to do a short post on them, but it’s taken a while because each is so powerful and filled with messages connected to its theme that I need to like take a breath in between them. I think my favourite is Tesoro as it’s about family, the women in Salgado’s life and survival.

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I’m tagging: Shalini / Leslie / Haf / Kay / Emily / Acqua / Christina if you want to do the tag as well!

LGBT Ebooks on sale!

I already made this post for my book tumblr, so I thought why not take two minutes to post it here as well and just take it down when the sale disappears. I have no idea if it’s a coincidence that so many books are on sale for kindle on amazon right now, but probably everyone in charge of this has just gone “it’s the start of pride month” at the same time.

I found a handful of different lgbt (and a few other) kindle books I’ve wanted for a long time on sale on amazon today by accident, but it’s so easy to miss so what I do is just have a kindle wishlist of ebooks that are expensive (often because just released) and then just scroll through semi-regularly, because it will tell you the percentage the price dropped with. Also fuck amazon and authors should be paid a lot and all that, but I’m also a poor uni student (also without access to library bc of corona) so forgive me.

If you didn’t know; https://queerbooksforteens.com/ is an amazing service that tells you what kind of representation each queer book has.

Also I would love to know how you find out as a reader when books on your TBR are on sale! I tried the bookbub service for a while, but it seems to have gotten worse and I’m giving up on that soon.

Books on sale (most I have yet to read, but really want to); 

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward: 

Not queer, but I just heard about it. It’s written by black author and about a poor african-american family struggling after hurricane Katrina, has magical realism elements it seems. 

Heartstopper vol. 1 by Alice Oseman: fav of mine! queer boys, m/m relationship

The darkest part of the forest by Holly Black: love this book, only a gay side character

City of Strife by Claudie Arseneault:

Lgbt fantasy with aromantic asexual characters and ownvoices for that, and I think basically the whole cast of characters are queer

Let’s Talk about Love by Claire Kann: biromantic asexual black main character, ownvoices

If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo: ownvoices, transgender woman as main character

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Anticipated Queer Book Releases 2020 | #PrideLibrary20

I’m joining in on some of the #pridelibrary20 prompts, hosted by The Library Looter, Michelle Likes Things and Anniek’s Library throughout June. Here’s a link to a summary of my posts from last year.

I feel that more often than not I learn about the existence of queer books after they’ve come out rather than before, because it’s been so much more up to the different readers to share the good books around, rather than good marketing promoting them before they are released. Mostly my strategy for new queer releases is finding authors I like and then lie and wait, scouting for new ones.

There were a lot of queer books released in May that I looked forward to reading, but not that many for the rest of the year, so hopefully I will find some new books reading through similiar posts.

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June Releases

The State of Us by Shaun David Hutchinson: 2nd of June

• Not quite sure what happens here, but the son of a democrat and son of a republican apparently fall in love, and it’s being compared to the other gay president/royal book ‘Red, White and Royal Blue’ that I truly loved.

Loveless by Alice Oseman: 9th of June

• Asexual and aromantic main character coming out. Set at university, featuring lots of platonic love! I truly love Oseman’s writing in general, based on her other books (excluding Solitaire tbh).

Further Into the Future

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Fence: Striking Distance by Sarah Rees Brennan and C. S. Pacat – 29th of september

• There’s a comic series by C. S. Pacat called Fence that I thought had so much potential, but really truly sucked in quality and plotline and anything but the aesthetics. I really like Sarah Rees Brennan as an author and hope she’ll fix it.
• Some of the guys on the team are gay, I don’t remember how many.