Elatsoe - a YA Supernatural Mystery with an Asexual main character (who is also Lipan Apache)

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger

Imagine an America very similar to our own. It's got homework, best friends, and pistachio ice cream. There are some differences. This America been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and those not. Some of these forces are charmingly everyday, like the ability to make an orb of light appear or travel across the world through rings of fungi. But other forces are less charming and should never see the light of day. Elatsoe lives in this slightly stranger America. She can raise the ghosts of dead animals, a skill passed down through generations of her Lipan Apache family. Her beloved cousin has just been murdered, in a town that wants no prying eyes. But she is going to do more than pry. The picture-perfect facade of Willowbee masks gruesome secrets, and she will rely on her wits, skills, and friends to tear off the mask and protect her family.

You can read about Darcie's debut novel being a Publishers Weekly flying start here.

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Echo After Echo - Two Teen Girls Are Caught Up in a Murder Mystery (and Their Own Love Story)

Echo After Echo by Amy Rose Capetta

Zara Evans has come to the Aurelia Theater, home to the visionary director Leopold Henneman, to play her dream role in Echo and Ariston, the Greek tragedy that taught her everything she knows about love. When the director asks Zara to promise that she will have no outside commitments, no distractions, it’s easy to say yes. But it’s hard not to be distracted when there’s a death at the theater — and then another — especially when Zara doesn’t know if they’re accidents, or murder, or a curse that always comes in threes. It’s hard not to be distracted when assistant lighting director Eli Vasquez, a girl made of tattoos and abrupt laughs and every form of light, looks at Zara. It’s hard not to fall in love.

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Zenobia July - A Trans Teen Girl Solves Cyber Crimes

Zenobia July by Lisa Bunker

Zenobia July is starting a new life. She used to live in Arizona with her father; now she's in Maine with her aunts. She used to spend most of her time behind a computer screen, improving her impressive coding and hacking skills; now she's coming out of her shell and discovering a community of friends at Monarch Middle School. People used to tell her she was a boy; now she's able to live openly as the girl she always knew she was.

When someone anonymously posts hateful memes on her school's website, Zenobia knows she's the one with the abilities to solve the mystery, all while wrestling with the challenges of a new school, a new family, and coming to grips with presenting her true gender for the first time.

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An Interview with Lisa Bunker, Author of Queer Teen Novel "Zenobia July," Which Comes Out Tomorrow!

Here's my interview with Lisa, on the eve of her second book being published!


Lee: Congratulations on the new book - tell us about Zenobia July.

Lisa: Zenobia July is a teenage trans girl with genius-level coder/hacker skills and a troubled past who has moved to Portland, Maine to live with her cool Lesbian aunties after the death of her last surviving parent. As our story opens she is about to start a new school year, attending for the first time as the girl she has always known herself to be. She makes friends, but also tangles with the school’s queen bee and a cyber-rival. Then, when someone hacks the school’s website, posting hateful memes, she knows she can help, but struggles to decide whether it is worth the risk of increased attention.

Lee: Why that title?

Lisa: One of the funnest parts of gender transition is getting to choose a new name. Zen wanted to pick something really unusual and interesting. She chose “Zenobia” because it starts with Z and ends with A – an alphabetical depiction of going to back to the beginning and starting over. “July” is the month she changed her name. Also, there’s a character in the book who cares a lot about words or combinations of words with no repeat letters, so I needed a name for Zen that fit that.

Lee: How much of the main character is you?

Lisa: Not all that much, actually. I didn’t transition until my 40’s. Zen came to life in my mind after the death by suicide in 2014 of Leelah Alcorn, a trans girl in Ohio. Leelah left behind an eloquent note on Tumblr, asking the world to make sure her death meant something. So I started thinking, what did Leelah need that she didn’t have to survive her life? And that’s how Zen started to take shape. Where Zen and I overlap is in the often surreal experience of switching genders in the world – all the odd little ways gender pops up all the time. 


Lee: Your debut novel, Felix Yz came out two years ago. What’s different this time around?

Lisa: Felix is gay, but his identity is more incidental to his story than Zen’s, whose struggle to navigate middle school while living as a girl for the first time is one of the main threads of her book. Also, Felix was in first person, with a strong feature for his quirky voice – the book takes the form of his secret blog. Zen is close third person, so the narrative style is markedly different. And in Felix I included lots of LGBTQ characters as a kind of writerly lark. This time, it’s very much on purpose, as I seek to depict the power of queer community and family of choice to save lives. 


Lee: Is there a vision of Zenobia July being the first of a series? (The solves cyber crimes makes me think, perhaps…)


Lisa: Yes! Zen is my entry into the super-sleuth canon. I’ve always wanted to write a Sherlock Holmes-style character. It’s just that my Holmes is a teenage trans girl, and she does her genius detecting in cyberspace, not in the real world. This book is her origin story, in which she meets Arli, the character who will become her Watson. I hope to write many more Zen books.


Lee: Sounds so fun! What do you hope readers get from reading your latest?


Lisa: Reading pleasure, of course! Beyond that, though, I hope to add to the growing body of nuanced fictional portraits of trans people. I want to increase the world’s understanding of the trans experience, and I want to show that non-binary folk are just regular humans, with strengths and weaknesses, but as worthy to love and be loved as anyone else.

Lee: Awesome! Anything else you’d like to share?


Lisa: I’ve been thinking a lot about what I call “post-binary narrative,” by which I mean a couple things. The obvious first layer is story focused on queer characters, foregrounding them and digging into the details of their experiences living outside the imposed binaries of gender and sexuality, which are still so strong. But I’m also interested in avoiding what I see as pitfalls of a too-binary approach to storytelling, with Heroes and Villains. There are some transphobic characters in the story, but I’ve taken care to depict them as human too, with their own reasons for what they do. 


Thanks for taking the time to tell us about Zenobia July, Lisa!

Safe - A Gay Teen Mystery - Was a gay student's death suicide, or murder? Kyle (also a gay teen) needs to find out.

Safe by Mark Zubro

Roger Cook is in the middle of his senior year when Kyle Davis, the most picked on kid in his high school, commits suicide. Roger agrees to write an article on Kyle for the school newspaper. As he gathers information, Roger realizes the dead boy was gay and may have been murdered. Gay himself, Roger wants to find out the truth, but this leads him to danger and the possibility of love. Roger opens himself to even greater risk while trying to make those around him safe.

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On a LARP - A Teen Lesbian Mystery in the World of Live Action Role Playing Games

On a LARP by Stefani Deoul

Question: Do any of you know the truly scary part about being seventeen?

Answer: Your brain doesn't actually know, understand or care what it can't do; and, while this sounds great in theory, in my particular case, my under-developed brain apparently didn't know I couldn't fly.

So I jumped . . .
And I plummeted . . .

And I promise you, if I somehow manage to survive this act of immature-brain-encased-in-unbelievable-stupidity, I will gladly tell you exactly how I got here.

Which for the record, is chasing a dark-web killer through the middle of a live action role-playing game, better known as a LARP.

Join brainiac Sid Rubin and her posse, Jimmy, Imani, Vikram, and Ari as they join forces with Detective Robert "Tsarno the Barno" Tsarnowsky and his partner, Detective "Goddess" Emma Macdonald, and become embroiled in a virtual world of clues that will lead them to a very real, very deadly, very steampunk'd world of murder and mayhem.

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WONDERland - A YA Mystery with Teen Outcasts and Three Queer Relationships

WONDERland by David-Matthew Barnes

After her mother loses her battle to cancer, fifteen-year-old Destiny Moore moves from Chicago to Avalon Cove, a mysterious island in South Carolina. There, she starts a new life working part-time as a magician’s assistant and living with her eccentric uncle Fred and his hottie husband, Clark. Destiny is soon befriended by two outcasts, Tasha Gordon and Topher McGentry. She accepts their invitation to accompany them to a place called Wonderland, a former boarding house owned by the enigmatic Adrianna Marveaux. It’s there that Destiny meets and falls in love with Dominic, Tasha becomes enamored with Juliet, and Topher gives his heart to Pablo. When Destiny uncovers the reason she and her friends have really been brought to Wonderland, she’s faced with the most crucial choice of her life.

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The Missing Juliet - A Teen Lesbian Turns Detective To Try And Save Her Kidnapped Hollywood Starlet Crush

The Missing Juliet: A Fisher Key Adventure by Sam Cameron

Summer’s sizzling in the Florida Keys and Robin McGee should be planning for college. Instead, she’s passionately in love with beautiful movie starlet Juliet Francine. Too bad it’s a one-way crush shared by millions of others. Robin’s better off sticking to her summer job and fighting for the equal treatment of GLTBQ teens everywhere. But when Juliet is kidnapped from a film set in Key West, Robin turns amateur sleuth and recruits her friends to help in the search. Soon the FBI, police, and paparazzi are hot on the case as well. As time ticks down and the ransom notes grow dire, Robin will get just one chance to pull off a Hollywood happy ending—and maybe a shot at true love after all.

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The Quarterback's Secret - Pride Pack #3

By Ruth Sims (writing as R.J. Hamilton)

Set in the mid-1990s, The Pride Pack is a group of teenagers who band together to help each other out in a time before teens were equipped with cell phones, when homework was done in a notebook rather than on a laptop, and when gay-straight alliances were nothing but a pipe dream.

Athletics remain largely homophobic environments. How will his teammates react if 16-year-old baseball pitching star Ben Reis admits he is gay? And so he mostly lies about his sexuality even when he is with the Pride Pack at the local gay and lesbian community center. All that may change however as the result of his falling through a sinkhole into an unknown cavern and learning The Quarterback’s Secret ...

This is book three in the Pride Pack series, with the first two, Who Framed Lorenzo Garcia? and The Case Of The Missing Mother being re-issued by Cheyenne Publishing with new covers:

And this is really cool - the author is donating her royalties from all three titles in this series to The Trevor Project. 

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"Shine" by Lauren Myracle... It's not a National Book Award Finalist after all, but maybe it can be a best-seller

By Lauren Myracle

Cat is 16 when her best friend Patrick, a gay 17 year old, is murdered.  And now she's determined to discover who in her small Southern town did it.

"...a harrowing coming-of-age tale couched in a deeply intelligent mystery."

"Shine" is very much in the news because last week it was announced as one of the five young adult novel finalists for the National Book Award.  And then, it was revealed that it was mistakenly short-listed, because it's title, Shine, is so close to the actual fifth book on the list of finalists, Chime, by Franny Billingsley.  So then they said that Lauren's book could stay on the list of finalists due to the book's merit, and there would be six finalists (but "Shine" clearly wouldn't be the winner.)  And then later last week, they contacted the author and asked her to withdraw her book from the competetion, "to preserve the integrity of the award and the judges' work."  Wow - so poorly handled.

You can read more about the events and hear Lauren's incredibly gracious take on the whole mess in this Vanity Fair article.

The only two good things I can share to come out of this? 

The National Book Foundation "has agreed to donate $5,000 to the Matthew Shepard Foundation." (I suppose this is their apology to those of us who felt the subject matter of anti-gay hate crimes shouldn't be dissed in this way.)

And the other good thing is that "Shine" is getting a lot of attention.  So maybe it won't win the National Book Award.  But I think it has a pretty good chance of becoming a best seller.

What do you think?  And add your review of "Shine" in comments!

Namaste,
Lee