Happy Pride Month! Pride Month is a remembrance of the pursuit of quality and acceptance for the LGBTQ+ community. This month, we celebrate and lift up LGBTQ+ voices! Here are just some of our favorite titles this month. Some are fiction and non-fiction – all of them are great reads! Check them out!
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
Pride Colors by Stevenson, Robin
Through gentle rhymes and colorful photographs of adorable children, Pride Colors is a celebration of the deep unconditional love of a parent or caregiver for a young child. The profound message of this delightful book is you are free to be whoever you choose to be; you’ll always be loved.
Mama and Mommy and Me in the Middle byLaCour, Nina
When her mother goes on a business trip, a little girl, who loves to sit between Mama and Mommy at the table, misses her a lot and feels empty until Mommy finally comes home, filling the void with love.
Mr. Watson’s Chickens by Dapier, Jarrett
Mr. Watson loves his three chickens, and every morning he and Mr. Nelson count them; but when they start to multiply, his house and tiny yard are soon overrun, and the noise and mess are driving Mr. Nelson crazy–so the couple set out to find a new home for the chickens
Cameron Battle and the Hidden Kingdoms by Perry, Jamar
When Cameron and his best friends are magically transported through the pages of an ancestral book to the fabled West African country Chidani, they find a kingdom in extreme danger and have to find a way to save the Igbo people.
TEEN BOOKS
Only On the Weekends by Atta, Dean
Fifteen-year-old Mack is a hopeless romantic–likely a hazard of growing up on film sets thanks to his father’s job. Mack has had a crush on Karim for as long as he can remember and he can’t believe it when gorgeous, popular Karim seems into him too. But when Mack’s father takes on a new directing project in Scotland, Mack has to move away, and soon discovers how painful long-distance relationships can be. It’s awful to be so far away from Karim, and it’s made worse by the fact that Karim can be so hard to read. Then Mack meets actor Finlay on set, and the world turns upside down again. Fin seems fearless–and his confidence could just be infectious. Award-winning author Dean Atta crafts a beautifully nuanced and revelatory story in verse about the exquisite highs and lows of first love and self-discovery.
I Kissed Shara Wheeler : a novel by McQuiston, Casey
Chloe Green is so close to winning. After her moms moved her from SoCal to Alabama for high school, she’s spent the past four years dodging gossipy classmates and a puritanical administration at Willowgrove Christian Academy. The thing that’s kept her going: winning valedictorian. Her only rival: prom queen Shara Wheeler, the principal’s perfect progeny.
But a month before graduation, Shara kisses Chloe and vanishes.
On a furious hunt for answers, Chloe discovers she’s not the only one Shara kissed. There’s also Smith, Shara’s longtime quarterback sweetheart, and Rory, Shara’s bad boy neighbor with a crush. The three have nothing in common except Shara and the annoyingly cryptic notes she left behind, but together they must untangle Shara’s trail of clues and find her. It’ll be worth it, if Chloe can drag Shara back before graduation to beat her fair-and-square.
Thrown into an unlikely alliance, chasing a ghost through parties, break-ins, puzzles, and secrets revealed on monogrammed stationery, Chloe starts to suspect there might be more to this small town than she thought. And maybe—probably not, but maybe—more to Shara, too.
If You Change Your Mind by Weber, Robby
Harry wants nothing more than to write Hollywood screenplays. He knows the first step toward achieving that goal is winning a screenwriting competition that will seal his admission into the college of his dreams, so he’s determined to spend his summer free of distractions—also known as boys—and finish his script. After last year, Harry is certain love only exists in the movies anyway.
But then the cause of his first heartbreak, Grant, returns with a secret that could change everything—not to mention, there’s a new boy in town, Logan, who is so charming and sweet, he’s making Harry question everything he knows about romance. As he tries to keep his emotions in check and stick to his perfect plan for the future, Harry’s about to learn that life doesn’t always follow a script.
The Midnight Girls by Jasinska, Alicia
It’s Karnawał season in the snow-cloaked Kingdom of Lechija, and from now until midnight when the church bells ring an end to Devil’s Tuesday time will be marked with wintry balls and glittery disguises, cavalcades of nightly torch-lit “kuligi” sleigh-parties. A time where witches are burned, and two enchantresses secretly compete for the heart of a prince, only to discover that they might be falling for each other.
ADULT BOOKS – FICTION
Love & Other Disasters by Kelly, Anita
Recently divorced and on the verge of bankruptcy, Dahlia Woodson is ready to reinvent herself on the popular reality competition show Chef’s Special. She’s focused on winning until she meets London Parker, the first openly nonbinary contestant on America’s favorite cooking show. Dahlia realizes she might want a future with London more than she needs the prize money.
We Do What We Do in the Dark by Hart, Michelle
Mallory is a freshman in college, reeling from her mother’s recent death, when she encounters the woman. She sees her for the first time at the university’s gym, immediately entranced. Soon, they meet, drawn by an electric tension and shared past wounds; before long, they begin sleeping together in secret. Self-possessed, successful, brilliant, and aloof–the woman is everything Mallory wants…and wants to be. Desiring not only the woman but also the idea of who she is when they’re together, Mallory retreats from the rest of the world, solidifying a sense of aloneness that has both haunted and soothed her since childhood and will continue to do so for years even after the affair ends. As an adult, Mallory must decide whether to stay safely in isolation or step fully into the world, to confront what the woman meant to her and how their relationship shaped her, for better or worse.
Mallory’s life is transformed by loss and by love and by discovering who she is while enduring both. In this enthralling debut novel, the complexities of influence, obsession, and admiration reveal how desire and its consequences can alter the trajectory of someone’s life.
Detransition, Baby : a novel by Peters, Torrey
Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn’t hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.
Ames isn’t happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames’s boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she’s pregnant with his baby—and that she’s not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he’s been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?
Real Life byTaylor, Brandon (Brandon L. G.)
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood.
ADULT BOOKS – NON FICTION
Real Queer America : LGBT stories from red states by Allen, Samantha
Ten years ago, Samantha Allen was a suit-and-tie-wearing Mormon missionary. Now she’s a senior Daily Beast reporter happily married to another woman. A lot in her life has changed, but what hasn’t changed is her deep love of Red State America, and of queer people who stay in so-called “flyover country” rather than moving to the liberal coasts.
In Real Queer America, Allen takes us on a cross-country road-trip stretching all the way from Provo, Utah to the Rio Grande Valley to the Bible Belt to the Deep South. Her motto for the trip: “Something gay every day.” Making pit stops at drag shows, political rallies, and hubs of queer life across the heartland, she introduces us to scores of extraordinary LGBT people working for change, from the first openly transgender mayor in Texas history to the manager of the only queer night club in Bloomington, Indiana, and many more.
Tomorrow Will Be Different : love, loss, and the fight for trans equality by McBride, Sarah
Sarah McBride is on a mission to fight for transgender rights around the world. But before she was a prominent activist, and before she became the first transgender person to speak at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, she was a teenager struggling with her identity. A timely and captivating memoir about gender identity set against the backdrop of the transgender equality movement, by a leading activist and the National Press Secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization.