LGBTQ+ Read in Color Recommended Reads

It’s Pride, Baby! by Allen R. Wells, illustrated by Dia Valle (32 pp, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Join a queer family as they celebrate Black Pride in Washington, D.C. From painting posters to walking in a Pride Parade with neighbors to watching fireworks, this special day is packed with fun. Ages 3 – 5.

The Right Blessing: An Identity Story by Kerry Olitzky and Samantha Orshan Kahn, illustrated by Violet Tobacco (32 pp, Kar-Ben Publishing, 2026). Joey has always felt different, especially when playing with friends like Adam or sitting with the girls at recess. By age nine, she knows she’s not a boy, but telling her family is terrifying. One Shabbat evening, Joey’s anxiety builds during the family blessing. Unable to bear being called a boy any longer, she stops the ceremony and shares, “I’m not really a boy.” Her parents listen closely and, after a heartfelt conversation, offer unconditional love. They agree to use “she” and “her” for Joey. Though they make mistakes, they do their best, and Joey finally feels seen. At the next Shabbat dinner, she receives the blessing she’s always wanted. Ages 5 – 8.

Benji Zeb Is a Ravenous Werewolf by Deke Moulton (304 pp, Tundra Books, 2025). Benji Zeb has a lot going on. He has a lot of studying to do, not only for school but also for his upcoming bar mitzvah. He’s nervous about Mr. Rutherford, the aggressive local rancher who hates Benji’s family’s kibbutz and wolf sanctuary. And he hasn’t figured out what to do about Caleb, Mr. Rutherford’s stepson, who has been bullying Benji pretty hard at school, despite Benji wanting to be friends (and maybe something more). And all of this is made more complicated by the fact that, secretly, Benji and his entire family are werewolves who are using the wolf sanctuary as cover for their true identities! Ages 10 – 14.

Costumes for Time Travelers by A. R. Capetta (224 pp, Candlewick, 2025). Anyone who has hiked through time knows the town of Pocket. It’s the place travelers first reach after they stumble away from their hometime, passing through on their way to any other when. To Calisto, Pocket is home. They love their grandmother’s shop, which is filled with clothes from every era that are used to make costumes for time travelers. Calisto has no intention of traveling—it’s too dangerous. For Fawkes, traveling is life. He put on time boots when he was young and has been stumbling through eras ever since. When he floats into Pocket, Calisto meets him for the first time, though Fawkes has seen Calisto—in glimpses of what hasn’t happened yet. He’s also seen the villains chasing them both. Now Calisto and Fawkes must rush—from Shakespeare’s London to ancient Crete to California on the eve of a millennium—to save Pocket, and travelers, from being erased. From the Lambda Literary Award–winning author of The Heartbreak Bakery comes a fairy-tale romance that weaves in and out of time, from kiss to kiss and costume to costume. Ages 14 – 17.

The Gender Binary is a Big Lie: Infinite Identities Around the World by Lee Wind (312 pp, Zest Books, 2024). While many people identify as men or women, that is not all there is. The idea that all humans fall into one of two gender categories is largely a construct created by those who benefit from that belief. The reality is that gender is naturally diverse, falling inside and outside of those boxes, and more expansive ideas of gender have always existed. Ages 11 and up.

Here Goes Nothing by Emma K Ohland (272 pp, Carolrhoda Lab, 2024). Eighteen-year-old Beatrice has never been a fan of her neighbor Bennie, but when Beatrice’s beloved younger sister starts dating one of Bennie’s closest friends, Beatrice is drawn into their social circle. As Beatrice wrestles with increasingly confusing feelings for Bennie, her usually close relationship with her sister is fraying, her grief over their mother’s death is simmering in the background, and she’s overwhelmed by looming senior-year decisions about what she wants to do with her life. But after a crisis arises, Beatrice must figure out how to process past traumas and open up to the possibilities of the future. Ages 14 and up.

King’s Legacy by L.C. Rosen (256 pp, Union Square & Co., 2025). Tennessee Russo has faced bigger challenges than this. He’s evaded traps, found lost treasures, become kind of famous, gotten over a bad relationship, and survived all that. Filming a new season of his artifact-hunting reality show for a major international streaming service should be easy, right? His archeologist dad even said Tennessee is in charge of what artifacts they go after. Plus, Ten’s awesome best friend (and sometimes more), Gabe, gets to come along on the adventure.

But here’s the thing: Tennessee wants to hunt down a long-lost gift that King David gave Jonathan. Queer history, especially of Biblical figures, isn’t easy for some people to believe or accept. Tennessee has done his research, and he knows where the clues point. But what happens when the producer of the show threatens to misrepresent not just Ten’s ideas, but his identity? Ages 12 – 18.

Mountain Upside Down by Sara Ryan (240 pp, Dutton Books for Young Readers, 2026). Alex Eager lives in Faillin, OR with her grandmother, a retired librarian. Life should be great for Alex, since she finally worked up the courage to ask her best friend PJ if they could be more than friends and she said yes. But their new relationship will have to be long distance, because PJ is moving. On top of that, Alex is worried that something is wrong with her increasingly forgetful grandmother. And to make matters worse, Faillin is holding a referendum on library funding, and things aren’t looking good. Will anything good for Alex ever last? Ages 10 – 13.

The Nightland Express by J.M. Lee (368 pp, Erewhon Books, 2024). When bright, brash Jessamine Murphy finds a recruitment poster for the Pony Express, her tomboy heart skips a beat: not only for adventure, but for the chance to track down her wayward father in California. Eager to reunite her fractured family, Jessamine cuts her hair, dons a pair of trousers, and steps into the world as Jesse.

With a bit of trickery, Jesse wins a special assignment—as does Ben Foley, a quiet but determined boy who guards secrets as closely as Jesse does. The two are to transport unusual cargo along an unusual route: the Nightland Express. They ride west together, one excitedly navigating the world as a boy, the other passing as white to escape the monsters from his past. Ages 14 and up.

Night Owls by A. R. Vishny (368 pp, HarperCollins, 2024). Clara loves rules. Rules are what have kept her and her sister, Molly, alive—or, rather, undead—for over a century. Work their historic movie theater by day. Shift into an owl under the cover of night. Feed on men in secret. And never fall in love.

Molly is in love. And she’s tired of keeping her girlfriend, Anat, a secret. If Clara won’t agree to bend their rules a little, then she will bend them herself.

Boaz is cursed. He can’t walk two city blocks without being cornered by something undead. At least at work at the theater, he gets to flirt with Clara, wishing she would like him back.

When Anat vanishes and New York’s monstrous underworld emerges from the shadows, Clara suspects Boaz, their annoyingly cute box office attendant, might be behind it all.

But if they are to find Anat, they will need to work together to face demons and the hungers they would sooner bury. Clara will have to break all her rules—of love, of life, and of death itself—before her rules break everyone she loves. Ages 13 and up.

Sometimes the Girl by Jennifer Mason-Black (304 pp, Carolrhoda Lab, 2025). She’s still shaken from her brother’s recent suicide attempt; still pining over her ex, Maya; and still struggling to write again after a long dry spell. To earn enough money for a rebalancing trip with Maya, Holi gets a short-term job: organizing the attic of acclaimed author Elsie McAllister. It’s an unglamorous gig with a difficult boss. Elsie–whose fame rests on a single novel published decades ago–is in her nineties, in failing health, and fiercely protective of her privacy. But as Holi sorts through the attic’s surprising contents, she realizes there’s much more to Elsie than the novel that made her a legend. Ages 14 and up.

The Truth About Triangles by Michael Leali (336 pp, HarperCollins, 2024). Twelve-year-old Luca Salvatore is always running interference: in arguments between his younger twin siblings, in his parents’ troubled marriage, and between Will, the cute new boy in town, and Luca’s best friend, June, who just can’t seem to get along.

When the host of his favorite culinary TV show announces an open call for submissions for its final season, Luca is sure getting his family’s failing pizzeria on the show will save it and bring his falling-apart family together. Surprisingly, securing a spot is easier than kneading dough—but when the plan to fix everything comes out burned, Luca is left scrambling to figure out just the right recipe to bring his family and his friends back together. Ages 8 – 12.

A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff (352 pp, Dial Books, 2025). Lockdown is over, but A’s world feels smaller than ever. Coming out as trans didn’t exactly go well, and most days, he still barely leaves his bedroom, let alone the house. But the low point of A’s life isn’t online school, missing his bar mitzvah, or the fact that his parents monitor his phone like hawks—it’s the weekly Save Our Sons and Daughters meetings his parents all but drag him to.

At SOSAD, A and his friends Sal and Yarrow sit by while their parents deadname them and wring their hands over a nonexistent “transgender craze.” After all, sitting in suffocating silence has to be better than getting sent away for “advanced treatment,” never to be heard from again.

When Yarrow vanishes after a particularly confrontational meeting, A discovers that SOSAD doesn’t just feel soul-sucking…it’s run by an actual demon who feeds off the pain and misery of kids like him. And it’s not just SOSAD—the entire world is beset by demons dining on what seems like an endless buffet of pain and bigotry.

But how is one trans kid who hasn’t even chosen a name supposed to save his friend, let alone the world? And is a world that seems hellbent on rejecting him even worth saving at all? Ages 10 – 14.

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid (352 pp, Ballantine Books, 2025). Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir by Zoë Bossiere (272 pp, Harry N. Abrams, 2024). Newly arrived in the Sonoran Desert, eleven-year-old Zoë’s world is one of giant beetles, thundering javelinas, and gnarled paloverde trees. With the family’s move to Cactus Country RV Park, Zoë has been given a fresh start and a new, shorter haircut.

Although Zoë doesn’t have the words to express it, he experiences life as a trans boy–and in Cactus Country, others begin to see him as a boy, too. Here, Zoë spends hot days chasing shade and freight trains with an ever-rotating pack of sunburned desert kids, and nights fending off his own questions about the body underneath his baggy clothes.

As Zoë enters adolescence, he must reckon with the sexism, racism, substance abuse, and violence endemic to the working class Cactus Country men he’s grown close to, whose hard masculinity seems as embedded in the desert landscape as the cacti sprouting from parched earth. In response, Zoë adopts an androgynous style and new pronouns, but still cannot escape what it means to live in a gendered body, particularly when a fraught first love destabilizes their sense of self.

But beauty flowers in this desert, too. Zoë persists in searching for answers that can’t be found in Cactus Country, dreaming of a day they might leave the park behind to embrace whatever awaits beyond.

The Death of Vivek Oji: A Novel by Akwaeke Emezi (256 pp, Riverhead Books, 2021). One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son’s body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek’s closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens—and Osita struggles to understand Vivek’s escalating crisis—the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom. 

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (416 pp, Penguin Press, 2025). One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.

How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler (288 pp, Little, Brown Paperbacks, 2024). A queer, mixed race writer working in a largely white, male field, science and conservation journalist Sabrina Imbler has always been drawn to the mystery of life in the sea, and particularly to creatures living in hostile or remote environments. Each essay in their debut collection profiles one such creature, including:

-the mother octopus who starves herself while watching over her eggs,

-the Chinese sturgeon whose migration route has been decimated by pollution and dams,

-the bizarre, predatory Bobbitt worm (named after Lorena),

-the common goldfish that flourishes in the wild,

-and more.

The Iridescents: Stories by Emrys Donaldson (100 pp, The University Press of Shsu, 2026). Steeped in a fabulist version of the American South, The Iridescents highlights how the LGBTQ+ community transforms everyday acts of support and survival into miracles, redefining sainthood and spiritual history through the lens of queer resilience and fierce joy. A trans man visits a donut shop with his ailing dog to pray for advice. Genderqueer lovers search the desert for a ballerina saint. Three-hundred-year-old crustacean oracles predict the future of our oceans. Blending irreverence with reverence, these stories explore the contemporary yearning to find meaning in something larger than ourselves.

Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between by Amrou Al-Kadhi (304 pp, Fourth Estate, 2022). Amrou knew they were gay when, aged ten, they first laid eyes on Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. It was love at first sight.

Amrou’s parents weren’t so happy…

From that moment on, Amrou began searching in all the wrong places for ways to make their divided self whole again.

Life as a Unicorn is a hilarious yet devastating story of a search for belonging, following the painful and surprising process of transforming from a god-fearing Muslim boy to a queer drag queen, strutting the stage in seven-inch heels and saying the things nobody else dares to ….

Martyr!: A Novel by Kaveh Akbar (352 pp, Vintage, 2024). Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Ordinary Love: A Novel by Marie Rutkoski (368 pp, Knopf, 2025) Emily has, by all appearances, a perfect life: a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, two healthy children, and a husband who showers her with attention. But the truth is more complicated: Emily’s marriage is in trouble, her relationship with her parents is fraught, and she is still nursing a heartbreak from long ago. When Emily runs into her high school girlfriend at a cocktail party, that heartbreak comes roaring back. But Gen Hall is no longer the lanky, hungry kid with holes in her shoes who Emily loved in her youth. Instead, Gen is now a famous Olympic athlete with sponsorship deals and a string of high-profile ex-girlfriends.

Emily and Gen circle one another cautiously, drawn together by a magnetic attraction and scarred by their shared history. Once upon a time, Gen knew everything about Emily. And yet, she still abandoned her. Can Emily trust Gen again? Can they forgive each other for the mistakes they made in their past? Should Emily risk her children, her privacy, and the fragile peace she has found to be with a woman she loved long ago?

The Original: A Novel by Nell Stevens (336 pp, W. W. Norton & Company, 2025). Brought to her uncle’s decaying Oxfordshire estate when she was a child, Grace has grown up on the periphery of a once-great household, an outsider in her own home. Now a self-possessed and secretive young woman, she has developed unusual predilections: for painting, particularly forgery; for deception; for other girls.

As Grace cultivates her talent as a copyist, she realizes that her uncanny ability to recreate paintings might offer her a means of escape. Secretly, she puts this skill to use as an art forger, creating fake masterpieces in candlelit corners of the estate. Saving the money she makes from her sales, she plans a new life far from the family that has never seemed to want her.

Then, a letter arrives from the South Atlantic. The writer claims to be her cousin Charles, long presumed dead at sea, who wishes to reconnect with his family. When Charles returns, Grace’s aunt welcomes him with open arms; yet fractures appear in the household. Some believe he is who he says he is. Others are convinced he’s an impostor. As a court date looms to determine his legitimacy–and his claim to the family fortune–Grace must decide what she believes, and what she’s willing to risk.

Is Charles really her cousin? An interloper? A mirror of her own ambitions? And in a house built on illusions, what does authenticity truly mean–in art, in love, and in family?

Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States by Samantha Allen (320 pp, Little, Brown Paperbacks, 2020). Ten years ago, Samantha Allen was a suit-and-tie-wearing Mormon missionary. Now she’s a GLAAD Award-winning journalist 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.

Woodworking: A Novel by Emily St. James (368 pp, Crooked Media Reads, 2025). Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced—and trans. Not that she’s told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn’t exactly bursting with other trans women. Instead, she keeps to herself, teaching by day and directing community theater by night. That is, until Abigail Hawkes enters her orbit.

Abigail is seventeen, Mitchell High’s resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl. It’s a role she plays faultlessly, albeit a little reluctantly. She’s also annoyed by the idea of spending her senior year secretly guiding her English teacher through her transition. But Abigail remembers the uncertainty—and loneliness—that comes with it. Besides, Erica isn’t the only one struggling to shed the weight of others’ expectations.

As their unlikely friendship evolves, it comes under the scrutiny of their community. And soon, both women—and those closest to them—are forced to ask: Who are we if we choose to hide ourselves? What happens once we disappear into the woodwork?

Work to Do: A Novel by Jules Wernersbach (252 pp, University of Iowa Press, 2026). When Eleanor founded Guadalupe Street Co-op in the early 1980s, she was in her mid-twenties and madly in love with her girlfriend, Meg. Together, they envisioned an idyllic grocery store owned by its workers and customers.

Forty years later, Guadalupe Street Co-op is an iconic Austin business with a loyal customer base, an antiquated business model, and a disgruntled staff. Roz, one of the store’s senior managers, is too caught up stalking her ex-wife online to notice that her girlfriend, Molly, is plotting with her coworkers to unionize. Roz also doesn’t see that Molly is not-so-secretly in a situationship with Randy, the dairy manager leading their collective.

Unfolding over the course of a single week during Texas hurricane season, Work to Do pings between the co-op’s first year and present day, as the unionization bid reaches fever pitch. The wind howls, the power goes out, and water creeps through the front door as questions of who owns the grocery store and who has a right to its future are posed. And will the workers ever be paid enough to buy the organic groceries they shelve?