Volume 4, No. 12: 100 (More) Trans Books I Love

#TransRightsReadathon 2024

Greetings, book and treat people! We’re smack in the middle of the Trans Rights Readathon and, predictably, I have a massively long newsletter for you, so let’s get to it. Last year, in honor of the readathon, I made a list of 100 trans books I love. So obviously I started wondering if I could do it again—without repeating a single book. Guess what? I COULD!

To be honest, it wasn’t even hard. There is so much trans lit out there, mountains of it, in every genre. I am endlessly grateful for these books and what they’ve brought to my life. I hope you find some books to be grateful for on this list, too.

One of the reasons I love this event so much is that it’s about reading and raising money for trans organizations and mutual aid. I’m not running a fundraiser this year, but I am raffling off three amazing book bundles! All you have to do is make a donation in any amount to an organization supporting trans justice. All the details about how to enter are here. I’ll personally be donating to TASSN (Trans Asylum Seeker Support Network) , and I’d love it if you’d join me!

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This is an expansive, binary-crushing, label-defying list of trans lit. It includes books by trans authors that are not about trans characters, and books about trans characters that are not by trans authors. It includes books by authors whose identities I don’t know (or need to know), and books about characters whose lives, loves, and languages do not fit into neat boxes.

I have read every single one of these books, but the name is a bit of a misnomer: ‘100 (More) Trans Books I Love (& Love to Recommend)’ is more accurate. Some of my most beloved books are here. Also here are some books that are not for me, but might be for you. We are all different readers! The point is, there isn’t a book on this list I don’t wholeheartedly recommend.

It is, of course, packed with what I love most: picture books, contemporary fiction, WTF fiction, thorny nonfiction, memoirs, essays, and a whole lot of poetry. There’s so much poetry that I sorted it into three categories from least dense to most dense. Dense is not a value judgment, it’s just an indicator of how easy the poems are to slip into.

Clicking on titles will take you to Bookshop (and you can browse the whole list here). Linked text in the descriptions will take you to my reviews. For books I haven’t reviewed (or didn’t personally love), links will take you to other reviews I love. I tried to include a review for every book, but I didn’t quite manage it.

Picture Books

• Kapaemahu by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer, & Joe Wilson (words) & Daniel Sousa (art): This is a gorgeous bilingual retelling (and story about) the Native Hawaiian moolelo of The Healer Stones of Kapaemahu. I love everything about it. The gentle story of healing and community and magic. The fiery art, full of swirling colors. The thoughtfulness with which the authors approach both subject matter and language.

• When Aidan Became a Brother by Kyle Lukoff (words) & Kaylani Juanita (art): This book is about the absolute privilege and honor it is to have a trans kid in your family. It’s about the gifts queer and trans people bring to their families and loved ones. It’s about how transness expands families into new and beautiful shapes.

• My Rainbow by Deshanna Neal & Trinity Neal (words) & Art Twink (art): There are a thousand things I love about this book, starting with the fact that, once again, it is not a story about a family accepting their trans kid. It’s a story about a family lovingly solving a problem their trans kid is having.

• The Boy and the Bindi by Vivek Shraya (words) & Rajini Perera (art): A joy of a book about a young boy who is fascinated by his mother’s bindi and asks her about it.

• From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea by Kai Cheng Thom (words) & Kai Yun Ching & Wai-Yant Li (art): The sweetest, softest, wildest, most lovely book about being who you are and changing who you are. Who you are is change, mostly.

• 47,000 Beads by Koja Adeyoha & Angel Adeyoha (words) & Holly McGillis (art): What a beautiful book. Peyton is a Lakota kid who isn’t interested in dancing at powwow. When her Auntie Eyota asks her why, she bursts into tears and explains that there aren’t any dances for kids like her. Auntie Eyota instinctively understands her sadness and distress, and asks another elder if they’ll design and make regalia for Peyton. Grandparent L agrees readily, and together, the two of them reach out to Peyton’s family and community for help.

Poetry: Least Dense

• Blood Orange by Yaffa: An angry & loving ode to Palestinian resistance. I didn’t love it but I think you might, especially if you’re hesitant about poetry.

• Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul by Ryka Aoki: A painful but soft collection about trans grief and trans joy.

• Transit by Cameron Awkward-Rich: Absolutely gorgeous, transcendent poems about motion and travel, about moving through the world as a Black trans person in public spaces, about the distance between versions of self, about traveling through bodies, about the ways other people perceive your body is traveling.

• More than Organs by Kay Ulanday Barrett: A book of riotous and yearning disabled trans poetics.

• Hood Criatura by Féi Hernandez: A collection of personal and political poems of mundane moments and sparkling awakenings, all rooted in Inglewood, CA.

• The Good Arabs by Eli Tareq El-Bechelany Lynch: Poems about Arab identity, trans identity, queerness, displacement, family, language. The poems move fluidly between Canada and Lebanon, and there’s a sense of of both placelessness and familiarity in them.

• Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith: No words for the brilliance of this collection. I haven’t written about it anywhere, but here’s a review of Homie you should read (and you should also read Homie).

• Swollening by Jason Purcell: Loose, playful, yearning, seeking poems about queerness and illness and bodies.

Poetry: Medium Dense

• Space Struck by Page Lewis: Incandescent constellations of words and music.

• Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse: Here is a poetics of teeth and limbs, a physical poetics full of verbs that gnash and tear and sting, a poetics that claims and insists on body as story, that refuses to give the story of her body to anyone else’s voice.

• Orders of Service by Willie Lee Kinard III: This collection is about holy vessels, remade. It’s about the Southern Black church, about song and hymn and choir. Song as vessel for escape, hymn as vessel for praise, choir as vessel for what cannot be named.

• Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver: This is an absolutely stunning collection about queer and trans grief, survival, futurity. It’s a conversation between queer past and trans present, between versions of self and love, between interior and exterior landscapes. It’s a mourning song, a breaking elegy, not only for what was, but for what was not.

• More Sure by A. Light Zachary: Oh, this sly and playful book! These fierce and striving poems! These declarations and reinventions and wonderings, these beautiful odes to trans complexity and queer joy, these geodes of becoming and unbecoming, these hard and lovely lines that break apart into untold layers, uncovering and recovering themselves!

• Against Heaven by Kemi Alabi: A riotous, elegiac, keening, Black queer celebration. Alabi’s words are ropy and new. They tie language into impossible knots and they tug them loose.

• Freedom House by KB Brookins: Everything about this book feels visceral and sharp, soft and immediate. It’s loud and tender, full of breaking, and full of uncontainable Black trans and queer love.

• Slingshot by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson: Poems about Black queer survival. Poems that mess with and reinvent language.

• Dream of the Divided Field by Yanyi: Sharp and breaking poems about migration and transition, movement through home, body, culture, loss, family. Yanyi’s language is so exacting, I just want to drink it.

• Ecologia by Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen: Long and meandering poems that feel like journal entries. They’re concerned with the everyday—loving and cooking during the pandemic, wandering through memory, pondering the ends of old relationships.

Poetry: Most Dense

• Aster of Ceremonies by JJJJJerome Ellis: A truly astonishing book. Ellis’s work expands what I know and feel about language, disability, history, and embodiment in a thousand flowering ways.

• Hull by Xan Phillips: An explosion of forms—prose poems, white space, the way the words are laid out on the page. Phillips blends boisterous humor with an underlying seriousness.

• A Queen in Bucks County by Kay Gabriel: What a horny, playful, deliciously ordinary book about queer and trans life. It’s a collection of poems as letters, addressed to friends and lovers, all written by Turner, a character who makes a beautiful mess of every border, every binary.

• Wanting in Arabic by Trish Salah: Theoretical, dense, challenging, beautiful.

• Birthright by George Abraham: I adore this book and the languages it makes. It is full of worlds and words and wonderings, sparks and spirals, queer grief and Palestinian love, despair and desire.

Speculative(ish)/Magic(ish) Fiction

• The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia: A surreal maximalist fantasia against empire.

• Walking Practice by Dolki Min, tr. Victoria Caudle: Dark, gory, funny, smart, gross. Very little actually happens. Essentially the plot is: let’s ponder loneliness and embodiment while an alien has sex and eats people.

• Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner: What a weird and glorious book. It is full of queer performance art, time-travel, spaceships, strange talking animals, prophetic dreams, nonsensical bullfighting, a deeply broken criminal justice system, punishment as theatre.

• Future Feeling by Joss Lake: I didn’t understand half of this, and who cares, this is my favorite kind of book, because it’s not about the future, and it’s not about hexes and magic and world-building. It’s a story about trans brotherhood, loneliness, alienation, trying to find your way to self-worth under capitalism, queer abundance, the inherent strangeness of certain queer feelings. It’s our world, now, sideways.

• Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke: This whole book goes off in many unexpected directions and it just keeps getting more surreal the deeper you get. If you like being disoriented, you’ll enjoy this. But it’s not the kind of disorientation that leaves you feeling cynical. Underneath all the weirdness and existential crises and technological mysteries, there is a tender queer romance. The whole book, despite its absurdity, is actually quite earnest.

• All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders: I read this a long time ago and all I remember about it is that it made me feel sad and full, in the best way.

YA Fiction

• When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore: A dreamy, feathery, gauzy book about best friends, flowers, magic, and queer family.

• The Luis Ortega Survival Club by Sonora Reyes: A powerful book about sexual violence, friendship, and using your voice/body/brain to get what you want and need.

• Dear Twin by Addie Tsai: This is a fascinating and unusual YA novel that deals with so much—being a twin, queerness, sexual violence, family dynamics, emotional violence, Asian American communities. It’s messy in a way that feels so authentic to being a queer teenager trying to figure yourself out.

• Always the Almost by Edward Underhill: Classical piano competitions! Teenage drama! Love! Wisconsin! Truly, a joy.

• Ander & Santi Were Here by Jonny Garza Villa: A coming-of-age romance, and a love letter to San Antonio, Mexican American food, and street art. It filled me up.

Memoir

• A Life in Trans Activism by A. Revathi with Nandini Murali: In this memoir, Indian trans activist Revathi shares the story of her life and work. I only have a cursory knowledge of trans and hijra communities in India, and so while this book was both informative and insightful, I’m also keenly aware that it’s only one person’s story.

• Horse Barbie by Geena Rocero: This is a moving, poignant, and often funny memoir about Rocero’s childhood in the Philippines, her rise to national stardom as a trans pageant queen, her move to the U.S. and subsequent modeling career, much of which she spent closeted, her eventual choice to come out, and her work as an activist and artist.

• Miss Major Speaks by Toshio Meronek and Miss Major: This is a book about how to turn a moment of radicalization into a radical life. It’s about how to sustain and transform rage and grief into lifelong power. It’s a fierce and beautiful book of Black trans wisdom. Essential reading.

• Bless the Blood by Walela Nehanda: A passionate, raging, loving, exhausted & powerful memoir-in-verse about having cancer while being young, Black, queer, nonbinary and disabled. The audiobook is fantastic.

• What About the Rest of Your Life by Sung Yim: A memoir told from the inside. It’s not a recovery narrative or a story about healing; it’s a messy book about living through and within grief, loss, trauma.

• A Trans Man Walks Into a Gay Bar by Harry Nicholas: I enjoyed this immensely. Nicholas is warm, down-to-earth, and often quite funny. He writes openly and generously about his life as a trans man and his life of becoming, meandering through many iterations of identity.

Short Story Collections

• Homesick by Nino Cipri: I read this a long time ago and I don’t remember much about it, but I wrote on Goodreads that I adored the first and last stories in it, and now I’m remembering there is a long story about queer scientists that is brilliant. Also: so many wildly different queer and trans characters! We love to see it.

• A Safe Girl to Love by Casey Plett: Like a lot (all?) of Plett’s work, these are quiet stories about trans women living their lives. I really dig it.

• We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow by Margaret Killjoy: I loved this collection of slightly magical, eerily speculative, deeply queer and fiercely radical stories. The characters are all real and striving, big messes, living their lives in community and with their people, not moral, not simple, hacking and stirring shit up and creating Orc societies in the mountains of rural Washington, honoring their monster-selves.

• The Black Emerald by Jeanne Thornton: These stories are bizarre. WTF bizarre! Half the time I wasn’t exactly sure what I was reading. And yet Thornton’s prose is so assured that it didn’t really matter.

• Pretend It’s My Body by Luke Dani Blue: Weird in-between stories that blur all sorts of boundaries. I love the ones about weather especially.

• Variations by Juliet Jacques: One of my all-time favorite story collections. a fictional archive of queer and trans life in the UK, from the late 1800s through the mid 2000s. There are interviews, articles, letters, plays, academic papers, oral histories, etc. It’s playful and smart. Every story was a winner.

• God Loves Hair by Vivek Shraya: A small collection of short stories, each accompanied by an illustration that captures something of the story’s essence. It feels more like a collection of diary entries, as all the stories center the childhood and early young adulthood of an Indian Canadian boy trying to make sense of himself and the world.

Historical / Non-Contemporary Fiction

• My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel, tr. Katherine Silver: What struck me most about this beautiful little novel, set in Santiago in 1986, is how funny and joyful it is, despite the dire times and constant danger it portrays. It’s about queer pleasure, and the power of queer imagination.

• Sketcktasy by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: A fever-dreamy book about being queer and trans and playing with gender and getting high and looking for love and surviving AIDS in Boston in the 1990s.

• When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb: What a blessing of a book! Do you need something very tender, very sweet, like the first taste of apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah, like the best raisin challah? Do you need a balm in the form of a book, with a dash of adventure? Do you need something bursting with hope? Something full of queer joy and Jewish silliness? You’re welcome!

• Dry Land by B. Pladek: How do you love something well? Can you love a place, a person, an idea, by learning its seasons, its whims, its shifting colors? Can you love something well by giving yourself up to it? What happens when you realize that all the ways you’ve been taught to know and love a thing—dissecting, labeling, claiming, fixing, saving—are not how to love well at all? I adore this book.

• The Gods of Tango by Caro de Robertis: Cantoras is a book of my life, but guess what, so is this. Outrageously beautiful.

• I Want What I Want by Geoff Brown: This is a very bleak book about a trans woman in the UK trying to live her life, published in the 1960s. It does not have a happy ending. I really, really loved it.

• Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas: A brilliant, layered, queer-to-its-bones, deeply funny, often upsetting, unbearably sad book about trans adolescence that broke me and opened me.

• Bad Habit by Alana S. Portero, tr. Mara Faye Lethem: This is a gorgeous & brilliant coming-of-age novel about a trans girl living in a working-class neighborhood in Madrid in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s funny, biting, raw, wise, tender, sharp. It’s brilliant in about fifty different ways. It’s about trans sisterhood and mentorship and family and what it takes to survive. It’s painful but celebratory. I love everything about it.

Graphic Fiction & Memoir

• Death Threat by Vivek Shraya & Ness Lee: After receiving transphobic hate mail online, Shraya decided to write a graphic memoir about it. It is surreal and upsetting, but it’s also joyful at times. She doesn’t reclaim the vile, hateful mail—she rejects it and transforms it. It’s one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a while about what it actually means to make art.

• A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings by Will Betke-Brunswick: This is a playful and devastating memoir about Betke-Brunswick’s mother’s cancer diagnosis and death while they were in college. They draw all the characters as different kinds of birds and somehow it’s whimsical even though the subject matter is tough. I really love how they capture the everyday-ness of grief. There is an ordinariness to so many of the scenes that is both heartbreaking and comforting. It’s such a gentle and loving book, written with so much heart and also survival humor.

• Us by Sara Soler, tr. Silvia Perea Labayen: A memoir about Soler’s girlfriend’s transition and how it changed their relationship in expected and unexpected ways. It’s very funny and very honest but mostly it’s full of so much love. Truly, one of the warmest love stories I’ve read in a long time.

• Gender Is Really Strange by Teddy G. Goetz & Sophie Standing: A short, thoughtful, and beautifully illustrated introduction to gender in all its weirdness!

• Stone Fruit by Lee Lai: This graphic novel is stunning in every way: visually, thematically, emotionally. It’s a quiet story about parenthood, aunthood, and sisterhood. Flawed humans trying to figure out if it’s possible to live in many worlds at once.

• Stars in Their Eyes by Jessica Walton & Aska: An adorable graphic novel about a disabled girl at her first big fan convention who forms a sweet connection with a nonbinary volunteer. It’s charming and real and nerdy and made me smile.

• Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky: Brilliant and earnest. Funny and dark. It plays with creature horror, it’s devastating at times, and there’s so much smart commentary. The horror is patriarchy, cishet bros, capitalism, transphobia, "nice" guys. So it's a lot. But interspersed with all of that are some of the most tender and moving scenes of queer and trans joy I’ve encountered in any book. The ending is perfect, 100/10, I wept.

• Ay, Mija! by Christine Suggs: What a beautiful, joyful graphic memoir! It’s about how much Suggs loves their Mexican family, about feeling homesick and alone in Mexico and feeling deeply connected to their family home in Mexico, about struggling with Spanish and feeling at home in Spanish, about their favorite tree, about food traditions and belonging and queerness. The art is so vibrant.

Romance

• Stars in Your Eyes by Kacen Callender: This is not your typical Hollywood romance. It’s about an established actor who’s famous for being an asshole and is hiding a lifetime of intense trauma, and an up-and-coming golden boy, the film industry’s latest darling. Trauma is front and center, and it’s intense—a really honest exploration of how trauma affects relationships. The structure is great, and makes space for actual healing while still keeping the romance the focus.

• Something Wild and Wonderful by Anita Kelly: Gay love on the Pacific Crest Trail + wholesome birding content, what more do you want?

• Their Troublesome Crush by Xan West: Xan West’s books are queer and kinky to their bones, full of trans disabled joy and struggle, sexy negotiation, and chosen families that make mistakes. I will forever be sad they’re gone and we won’t get any more.

• The Prospects by KT Hoffman: The trans minor league baseball romance of my dreams. 100/10. No notes.

Contemporary Fiction

• Any Other City by Hazel Jane Plante: Oh, my heart. Oh, my hurt and healing heart. I don’t know how to write about Tracy St. Cyr and her punk music and her yearning and her deep heartbreak and her sharp music and her silliness and her trans joy and her softness and her art-making. How do I write down the queer mysteries of this novel, the trans heart of this novel, the beating rhythms of a life, written down in words?

• Bellies by Nicola Dinan: If you know me from the internet, you know I have not been able to shut up about this book. It’s not exactly about friendship, and it’s not exactly about found family, although it does encompass both. Most truly, most beautifully, it’s a queer love story about shared history.

• The Call-Out by Cat Fitzpatrick: A novel in verse about a group of trans women in New York City and all their messy entanglements. I can’t shut up about it. It’s so delicious and so smart.

• The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine: Look, I adore this novel. It’s about a trans Lebanese doctor who spends a few weeks volunteering at a refuge camp in Greece. It asks so many unanswerable questions. What does it mean to “help”? How does cultural identity shift over time, and in different places? What are the ethics of offering aid, and how can we do so truthfully? But underneath all that, it’s about stories, and why we tell them.

• Darryl by Jackie Ess: Unsettling and weird and funny. Also: one of the most moving books about queer and trans loneliness that I’ve read in a while. It is uniquely absurd and true.

• The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi: This is my favorite Emezi book and it’s not even a contest. It’s alive and expansive. It doesn't adhere to simple ideas about queerness and gender. It plays with the straight gaze in such brash and daring ways. The queer friendship in it is breathtaking. There are also many missing moments. Emezi doesn't always invite the reader into the room. Sometimes you understand a relationship or an event only by seeing the consequences of something, rather than the thing itself. Perfection.

• He Mele a Hilo by Ryka Aoki: This is a strange and heartwarming novel about Hawaii. I love way Aoki writes about the community—it is very deeply a book about place. The lightning-fast POV jumps aren’t for me, but if you love Light from Uncommon Stars, I think you’ll love this too!

• Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi: I read this in 2018 and didn’t particularly like it, though then as now, I’m amazed by this book as a piece of art, an explosion of storytelling, an exploration of identity, an experiment in form. I’m excited to revisit it with the Queer Your Year book club later this year because a) it’s a classic of contemporary queer lit and b) I suspect I’ll feel differently about it on the reread.

Epistolary Books

• Faltas by Cecilia Gentili: These letters are raw and funny and full of so many different whole and broken pieces. I love this book with my entire being.

• Love and Money, Sex and Death by McKenzie Wark: This is a slim memoir full of fluid aliveness. Wark came out as trans in middle age, after a marriage, kids, and long writing/academic career. I won’t call this a “late in life” trans memoir, because one thing she does brilliantly is dispel notions around expected timelines for trans lives.

• Falling Back in Love with Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom: A big & gorgeous collection of letters—they’re really prose poems—full of hope and longing, anger and forgiveness, exhaustion, all the messy intricacies of healing.

• Dear Senthuran by Akwaeke Emezi: I talk a lot about world-opening books. Emezi talks a lot about creating worlds. This book opens and creates. I did review it, but this is the review you should read.

Nonfiction

• Transitional by Munroe Bergdorf: This is a blend of memoir and social commentary, but mostly memoir. I always learn something from queer and trans memoirs; so I was happy to hear Bergdorf tell some of her story. I love what she says about fluidity in gender and sexuality, change, and trans mentorship and friendship. Quick, informative, and moving.

• The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye: This is a direct and thoughtful book about trans life and liberation, specific to the UK but worthwhile for readers anywhere. Faye writes about the attacks trans people in the UK, U.S., and elsewhere are facing right now with searing fury. She writes generously and with compassion. Her arguments are nuanced, thoroughly researched, and interconnected. A feat.

• We See Each Other by Tre’vell Anderson: Fantastic! So smart and funny! So much nuance! Personal and deeply researched! It’s an exploration of the history of trans representation in film and TV, from the beginning of moving pictures through today.

• The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: This book is a retangling, a brilliant and beautiful book of disabled wisdom. It made me think about so many things in complicated and often uncomfortable ways: grief, friendship, different kinds of communities, mutual aid, interdependence, art, home, joy.

• Tar Hollow Trans by Stacey Jane Grover: I loved this whole book about trans, queer, and Appalachian identity; rural America; and how we construct stories about ourselves and the places we come from. But the essay on barns blew it out of the water for me.

• Whipping Girl by Julia Serrano: Look, I read this in 2019 and I didn’t write down anything about it. I even checked my old defunct blog. I do know that it rocked my world and made my brain dance, and that it’s probably time for a reread.

• Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam: This is a book of complexities and nuances, past and present, a book that goes beyond the emptiness of “we have always been here” to something murkier, and more fun, and harder: Who have we always been? How does who we are now change how we see and talk about who we used to be?

• Brilliant Imperfection by Eli Clare: I’m begging you to read Eli Clare. His writing centers queerness, transness, and disability in continually new ways. He's especially good at writing deeply and with a lot of vulnerability about his own experiences, while also analyzing and acknowledging what his experiences don’t touch. He also excels at writing down complicated, contradictory truths right next to each other, and then simply letting them be. It's hard to describe how powerful this is. I often throw around the word "grappling" to describe books that get into thorny knots of the world, but in this case, grappling feels like the only applicable verb. There’s a reason it's in the subtitle. This book is lush and deep and painful and revelatory and sharp and soaring with grapple.

• Trans Liberation by Leslie Feinberg: I don’t think there’s anything more important, more urgent, more complicated and inspiring and messy, than reading the work of queer and trans ancestors. This collection of Feinberg’s writing and speeches will live inside me forever. I haven’t reviewed this yet, but I love this review of another one of Feinberg’s books.

Novellas & Other Short Works

• Depart, Depart by Sim Kern: This book is a beautiful ode to queer family and complex inheritance. It’s about how choosing yourself—truly choosing yourself, the real way—is often about choosing other people.

• The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia: Oh, this soft little fantasy novella broke me right open.

• How to Fail as a Pop Star by Vivek Shraya: A play about failure! Everything Shraya writes is gold!

Middle Grade Fiction

• The Year My Life Went Down the Toilet by Jake Maria Arlow: This messy, wonderful book about a queer kid with inflammatory bowel disease is just so good. It’s good on so many levels. I found it excruciating to read at times because of its realness, but that only made me love it more.

• Ana on the Edge by A.J. Sass: This is the loveliest story about a nonbinary figure skater figuring out who she wants to be, and spoiler: she does it in community with other trans kids and adults. It’s a joy.

• The Tea Dragon Society by K. O’Neill: If you’ve heard over and over again that this is the coziest book, well, it is the coziest book, I promise! I also love what it has to say about ritual and craft and making things.

What trans books do you love? What are you reading this week? Where are you donating to? Come chat all things readathon with me in the comments!