Queer YA reading list

A couple of years back I started reading quite a bit of queer young adult (YA) fiction. People sometimes ask for recommendations. This is a list of books I would recommend.

It’s not exhaustive, it’s lavishly biased to boys smooching boys, and it’s in publication order.

I’ve italicised the ones I particularly liked, and included a short description that I will not promise to be either helpful or spoiler free.

Novels

• Dance on My Grave - Aidan Chambers (1982)
  Horny Adrian Mole has a summer of bereavement and getting some. In modernist fragments. Inspired the rather fun 2020 movie Summer of 85.

• My side of the Story - Will Davis (2007)
  Is this a good high school boy-meets-boy or just a refreshingly spiky and British one?

• Sprout - Dale Peck (2010)
  City kid moves to rural Kansas and - oh. Gosh. Right. Lot going on here, huh.

• Will Grayson, Will Grayson - John Green & David Levithan (2012)
  A playful tweak to the high school boy-meets-boy form, with some lovely character work.

• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Sáenz (2012)
  Wow.

• Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda - Becky Albertalli (2015)
  Adapted into Love, Simon (you know, the nice safe gay movie for straight people) this is a really solid One Of Those.

• Carry On (Simon Snow trilogy) – Rainbow Rowell (2015, 19, 21)
  Look, it’s not hard to write a better Chosen One Wizard Book than Gender Karen did but these are just so very much better.

• Whatever: or how junior year became totally f$@cked - S. J. Goslee (2016)
  High school boy-meets-boy, hapless snarky slacker edition. Really solid teen voice.

• Been Here All Along – Sandy Hall (2016)
  The cover tagline says “He’s in love with the boy next door”, and you absolutely can judge this book by it. A simple thing done well.

• The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue - Mackenzi Lee (2017)
  18th century adventure romance but arch and modern and a little bit sexy? I’m in. There are sequels.

• Noah Can't Even - Simon James Green (2017)
  Pitch perfect teen farce with breakneck calamity escalation but equally relentless warmth, and surprisingly low levels of cringe.

• A Boy Worth Knowing - Jennifer Cosgrove (2017)
  You know just that classic high school boy-meets-boy thing where one of the boys can talk to the dead.

• Here the Whole Time – Vitor Martins (2017)
  A beautiful, difficult, hopeful picture of what it’s like to be a fat gay kid, with the happy ending most of us didn’t get.

• Release - Patrick Ness (2017)
  I’d still think this was brilliant if it wasn’t loosely hung off Mrs Dalloway. With a vengeful ghost.

• The Dangerous Art of Blending In - Angelo Surmelis (2018)
   Beautiful, heartbreaking. An abuse recovery finding-love narrative that avoids either misery porn or saccharine.

• Noah Could Never - Simon James Green (2018)
  The sequel. Delicious chaos, an incident with a goose.

• Boy meets Hamster - Birdie Milano (2018)
  Imagine trying to have your sun-kissed coming of age summer while an episode of Hi-de-Hi! happens around you.

• Skating Through - Jennifer Cosgrove (2018)
  Oh no, the dashing, popular captain of the hockey team is secretly a big woofter, and - no, wait, it’s fine. Eventually. Adorably.

• The Black Flamingo – Dean Atta (2019)
  Damn, son. The epic poem about drag and self-fashioning I didn’t know I needed. Astonishing work.

• The Music of What Happens – Bill Konigsberg (2019)
  “Food truck romantic comedy” is a true but wholly inadequate description I can’t quite do better than. Touching. Fun.

• We Are Totally Normal – Naomi Kanakia (2020)
  Toxic masculinity hurts men too, constructing an identity is a process, and teenagers are dicks but it can kinda come good in the end. Note: Horny, very horny.

• How it All Blew Up – Arvin Ahmadi (2020)
  A gay Muslim American experience, a perfect summer in Rome, and an arguably stronger premise than execution.

• Wranglestone - Darren Charlton (2020)
  Not quite gay zombie The Knife of Never Letting Go, but you can see that from where it’s standing. 

• Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World - Benjamin Alire Sáenz (2021)
  Still wow. A little on the nose about teenage self-discovery, but in the exact way that teenage self-discovery is a little on the nose.

• A Complicated Love Story Set in Space – Shaun David Hutchinson (2021)
  Anticapitalist gay teen Red Dwarf with a smidge of Dollhouse. Storming fun.

• The Darkness Outside Us - Eliot Schrefer (2021)
  Project Hail Mary, But They Fuck And It's The Cold War But In The Future? I mean, not quite. Or at all. But it's hard to summarise without spoilers.

• A Marvellous Light - Freya Marske (2021)
  Edwardian gay gentlemen wizards? Yeah, ok.

I really need to fill in some of those pre 2012 and post 2021 gaps, huh.

Comics

• Young Avengers - Kieron Gillen - words, Jamie McKelvie - art, Matt Wilson - art (2013, 14)
  Multiple universes, Loki, adorable boyfriends, a baddie that’s arguably the personification of restrictive helicopter parenting, things exploding, stuff - just lost of great stuff, happening a lot.

• Princess Princess Ever After - K O’Neill (2014)
  Princess saves princess. Very sweet.

• Our Dreams at Dusk (trilogy) - Yuhki Kamatani (2015)
  Utterly beautiful mood piece about finding your people.

• The Backstagers - James Tynion - words, Rian Sygh - art (2016)
  Utterly lovely magical theatre kid caper.

• Check, Please - Ngozi Ukazu (2018, earlier as a webcomic)
  Gay Hocky Pie Comics! Really though, just read it.

• Heartstopper - Alice Oseman (2018, earlier as a webcomic)
  It’s Heartstopper. It’s lovely.

• Heavy Vinyl - Carly Usdin - words, Nina Vakueva - art (2018)
  Lesbian underdog record store crime fighters.

• Bloom - Kevin Panetta (2019)
  Sweet bakery romance.

• The Avant-Guards - Carly Usdin - words, Noah Hayes - art (2019)
  Lesbian underdog basketball comedy.

• Wynd - James Tynion - words, Michael Dialnyas - art (2021, ongoing)
  The little elf boy just wants to moon over the hunky palace gardener, but sadly a giant dark fantasy plot is about to kick off all around them. Brilliant setting and characters.

Those are all Amazon affiliate links. Sorry. The Kindle is just so damn convenient. However, I try to buy my physical copies from Gay’s The Word, and so should you.

How did I choose these?

In 2020 I started a spreadsheet of everything I read. It logs dates, a bit of genre information, a short comment, and a simple rating of “good” or “bad”. No sliding scale, no “medium”.

Why do this demented simplistic thing? It’s fun. And it forces me to be honest about whether - really, deep down - the thing I just read was worth my time.

All the books on this list scored “good”. That’s it. That’s the criterion. The short comment is included. I write them for me, no promises about them helping you.

How did I define “good”? Yes.

What qualifies it as “queer” or “YA” for that matter? There is no permutation of any universe in which I can give a reasoned and coherent answer to that without upsetting someone. Most of these have been shelved as YA by a bookseller, or marketed as such by a publisher. Most of these are at least somewhat preoccupied with the experience of queer identities and/or same sex attraction. But categories are slippery things and essentialism is not wildly to my tastes. Like with “good” vs “bad”, it felt about right at the time 🤷‍♂️