This story was so much more charming than I expected! The series writer, Ryan North, gently pokes fun at the ridiculousness of a girl with squirrel powers. But he seems to genuinely love the character and by the end I did as well. Erica Henderson, the illustrator, was more than up to the feat of drawing everything from a living suit of armor made of squirrels to Squirrel Girl punching Galactus. What a team. I definitely want to read more.

Alex knows his mother Val used to play Agent Frazer on the cult favorite TV show Anomaly, but the show ended when he was three. Now he is nine, and he and his mother set off on a cross-country road trip from New York to Los Angeles, stopping at comic conventions along the way. For the first time Alex sees the legions of his mother's fans and experiences the floating, impermanent worlds that get built for a weekend in hotels and convention halls from Cleveland to Chicago. He meets and befriends comics writers and artists, but this trip has another purpose and his mother is keeping it a secret. This book is an enjoyable and industry-savvy look into the comics world, a road trip novel, and an emotional mother and son story. As literary as it is nerdy.

I loved the world of this book: January, a planet tidally locked to its sun with one side frozen in perpetual night, the other burning and bright. The humans who colonized this planet many generations ago established several cities in the narrow band of dusk between the two extremes. They were aware of the native species, but they didn't understand the intelligence or careful climate control programs the indigenous beings had crafted to keep the world livable- until those systems started to break down under human intervention. I struggled to like the characters who fill this intriguing setting. I think for me the book was a little too long, and some of the emotional beats didn't land. I would have liked more of the January beings, more explicit queerness, and less of the painfully disintegrating friendship. I believe this book has been optioned for TV- I'm curious to see what changes might be made in an adaptation.

This is a delightfully queer historical fantasy, technically the second novella in a series but it can also stand alone. Chih, a travelling cleric-historian, is crossing a mountain pass on back of a mammoth with a guide when they encounter three deadly shape-shifting tigers. The only thing Chih can think of to keep them at bay is a story, one about the love affair of a beautiful scholar and her tiger wife. Full of ghosts, poetry, passion and danger, the tale unwinds with the tigers correcting Chih's mistakes. But will the story last until help can arrive? I listened to this as an audio book and it was a tantalizing 2.5 hours- I am hungry for more from Nghi Vo. How fortunate that her first full length novel is due out this summer!

I am a huge fan of Leckie's Ancillary books, the Imperial Radch trilogy, enough so that I decided to buy this book in hardback (a very rare indulgence; my shelf space is at a premium). This book introduces a new set of characters in a new human-inhabited system, Hwae. The main character is Ingrey, a young woman adopted into a politically important family who has devised a far-fetched scheme in order to impress her mother and secure a permanent inheritance. She has bought a prisoner's freedom from a high-security prison, in hopes that this person will be able to tell her the location of some high-level stolen antiques. Ingrey thought she had secured the person of Palad Budrakim, but when the former prisoner is recovered from cryostasis e claims to have no knowledge of Palad or the crimes e committed. And thus Ingrey's threadbare plan begins to unravel, leading her into the mesh of interwoven schemes around her- a stolen ship, a false identity, a murder and the beginning of an international incident of epic proportions.

I enjoyed this book, though as a stand-alone it didn't carry the same weight or reach the same scope as the previous trilogy. I also didn't think Ingrey was as strong or interesting character as Breq. However, what this new book does offer is a fascinatingly complex society which recognizes at least three genders, male, female and neman or neutral. The neman members of this society use e/em/eir pronouns which I found DELIGHTFUL- as they are the same pronouns I have been using for the past couple of years :D

A beautiful fairy-tale like story of a trans runaway finding friends, enemies, and strange magic in a big city. She leaves her hometown, her younger sister, and her strict Chinese immigrant parents behind on the day the mermaids beach themselves on the shore and fade away. She finds herself on the Street of Miracles and in the fabulous but fractured community of trans women for the first time. Then a trans woman is murdered, and the others must decide how they want to respond: activism or violence? Infused with ghosts, spells, fights, and forgiveness, this short novel hits hard. I was reminded of Kelly Link's stories, and the Bordertown books by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull. I definitely want to read more from Kai Cheng Thom, who I've heard interviewed on Gender Reveal (episode 81) as well as other podcasts.

Have you been looking for a cheesy Western with queer and nonbinary characters riding hippopotami on a gun-slinging adventure on the Mississippi river? If yes, then this is the book for you! I can't say that it was good, exactly, but it was entertaining. I liked hearing they/them pronouns used in a historical fiction novel, but story couldn't seem to fully commit to whether i's characters were anti-heroes or villains and the highly silly premise required a bit more suspension of disbelief that I have to offer at the moment so I probably won't continue the series.

An enjoyable, entertaining, and occasionally quite moving collection of essays on growing up Black, gay, and Christian before coming into your own on the internet. Thomas writes about a powerful high school friendship; about attending and failing out of Columbia; about stalking the queer student group before he was willing to publicly join; about dating, race, writing, and self-discovery. I definitely recommend the audiobook, which is read by the author.

A beautiful young adult comic which starts out light and then snuck up on me with a rising tide of emotions. Tiến is a first generation American son of Vietnamese immigrants, who wants to come out to his parents as gay, but isn't sure how to say it. He bonds with his mother through their shared love of fairy tales- throughout the book they read several stories to each other which wind through their own family narrative. The narratives of Tatterhood, the Little Mermaid and a Vietnamese version of Cinderella are beautiful illustrated and woven powerfully into the main storyline. Highly recommend.

PI Ivy Gamble has a twin sister who was born with magic, left in their teenage years to attend a magic boarding school, and is now a tenured teacher at another prestigious magic academy. Ivy has no magic, and suffered bitterness, jealousy and depression after her sister left and her mother died of cancer. Ivy tries to even avoid thinking about magic, or remember that it exists... until she is hired to solve a murder at the school where her twin teaches. The book's murder mystery is satisfying, something with enough quirks to keep me intrigued but enough clues that I was able to mostly solve it slightly ahead of the narrative. However, Ivy isn't a very likeable main character (she isn't mean to be) and her constant self-sabotaging and borderline alcoholism was a bit frustrating. Still, it is a unique take on the magic-school genre. If you like somewhat pulpy murder mysteries, or mysteries with supernatural twists, you will likely enjoy this.