IN THE DREAM HOUSE is Machado's memoir about being in an abusive relationship with another woman. She tells her story through vignettes framed by classic story tropes, drawing heavily from folklore and fairy tales to place the story of queer abuse into the overall human narrative.

This book is terrifying, heartbreaking, beautiful, insightful, incisive, and immediate. I have never read anything like it. Machado sets pieces of her story into nearly every type of storytelling framework, from ancient myth to film noir and beyond. Most strikingly, many anecdotes are "sourced" from folklore tropes - Machado writes herself as the heroine of a fairytale, albeit a Brothers Grimm-style one where the heroine must endure great pain and trauma to reach her promised bright future.

I was particularly fascinated by the varying uses of "You" and "I" when moving between her own past and present viewpoints. Like even she could not quite bring herself to believe that she had gone through this ordeal.

The city of New York has been born. It now joins the ranks of cities that have built a unique enough culture to become living entities with human avatars that embody the soul and spirit of the city. But something went wrong with New York's birth, and the avatars of the five boroughs find themselves racing against time to beat back a malicious force that is infecting the city and urging it toward collapse.

Okay, hear me out. You think you do not want a book about a parasitic entity overtaking a city. But you do. You want, you need this story of a city and its people rising up and coming together to fight. You need this story of loving your city, warts and all, and that love being powerful enough to save millions of humans.

You need this story of fighting gentrification and xenophobia by being your loudest, proudest self, this story where your race, gender, sexuality, your crudeness, scrappiness, battle-ready-ness is what saves you. No, I'm not crying, you're crying!

Thanks to Booksparks for the free advance copy of this book.

Jeremy was assigned female at birth. His parents thought he was a tomboy because he showed no interest in "girly" childhood things. But as he grew older and withdrew from social relationships where he was expected to act like a girl, they began to suspect something larger was at play.

ONCE A GIRL, ALWAYS A BOY is a "family memoir" - the book not only features transcripts of Jeremy's video diaries but first person writing from his parents and siblings, recalling their thoughts and experiences as Jeremy came to realize he was transgender and sought transition.

I'll be completely honest. At first, I was a bit annoyed at this book for centering the feelings of all the straight cis people in Jeremy's life. I usually take the stance of "too bad if it makes you feel uncomfortable, that's not really my problem" when it comes to straight people understanding and accepting queer lives. But as I worked through the book, I realized most of why I felt that way is because this book isn't for me. It's for all the parents of trans kids who are having a hard time understanding their kids; parents who aren't well versed in gender theory and don't know where to start. And I do think that is important. It's important for family of trans folks to have a guide who isn't their kid so the burden of teaching isn't on the marginalized person.

I do want to flag this, though. If you are a trans person, particularly one who has struggled with body dysphoria and social/family acceptance, take special care with this book. While Jeremy's family did come around, they had a hard time grasping the situation at first and cycled through a lot of transphobic thoughts and feelings, even when outwardly supporting their child. This is not to say the book itself takes a transphobic stance, just that in the process of debunking these ideas, they are stated pretty plainly in the writings of his parents.

Thanks to Atria Books for the free advance copy of this book.

Daphne is a plus-size Instagram influencer just beginning to make a name for herself and to feel comfortable in her own skin. Drue, her wealthy, popular high school best friend who incited the mean viral video incident that gave Daphne her platform, suddenly reappears in her life, asking Daphne to be her maid of honor in her fabulously expensive wedding on Cape Cod.

BIG SUMMER was originally intended to be published later this summer, and thank goodness Atria moved up the pub day. I was completely swept up in this story - it's a finding yourself story wrapped in a romance novel wrapped in a mystery. It's about loving difficult women and seeing the good and the bad in everyone, realizing that no one has it all and everyone has something that pains them.

I appreciated that a key aspect of the story was that Daphne was still fighting the ideas about fat women that she received as a child. Those words stick with you and resurface in your mind all the time, no matter how much work you've put in to love yourself. I also loved all the details about how she managed her Instagram account - I think lots of us bookstagrammers will find that it rings true.

I hesitate to discuss too much of the plot beyond the initial setup. This book takes a MAJOR turn halfway through! Go in blind, I promise it's worth the day you'll lose wrapped up in this sweet, painful, funny story. Then come back and talk to me about it!

Thanks to Simon and Schuster for the free advance copy of this book.

Twentysomething gay New Yorker Richard has hit a wall, both in his dissertation and his dating life. Somehow, though, his much brighter classmate Anne takes him under her wing, giving his writing new life - but she's also quite obviously in love with him. At the same time, Grindr finally pays off with Blake - attractive, kind, and wealthy. Now, instead of no paths forward, Richard may have too many.

Credit where it's due for this book - it's quite funny. GOING DUTCH is full of zingers and funny potshots at everyone from dudes on dating apps (I'm still gigging at "a gingham of torsos") to academia to directionless activists. But that's about where the fun ended for me and the confusion began.

GOING DUTCH is billed as a story about a love triangle, but is it really a triangle when Richard is the only one who even knows about all the parties? We're not caught between three people, he's just two-timing them. And two-timing them both to the point that they both ask him to move in with them, and when he's confronted by them he still can't even say he's been dating multiple people? I think that's where the trouble lay with this book for me - Richard was more or less inert, even in climactic scenes. He simply let everyone else push him along. And in the end, his bad behavior didn't even matter. Life went back to normal and he even got the guy and stayed friends with Anne. Not that every character should face children's story-style consequences for their actions, but why did we do any of this?