Books Are Jazzy

A reader lives a thousand lives before they die. The person who never reads lives only one.

Ophiuchus by Alexis Leriger de la Plante and Natasha Tara Petrovic was one of the books I read for ARC August. It's a graphic novel that is released today, August 27th, and I know I'll have to pick up a physical copy of this sooner rather than later!




The eponymous main character, Ophiuchus's life gets thrown off track when someone breaks through the gate that she has been guarding for ages, followed almost immediately by two robots who rope her into joining their quest to defeat an evil virus.

While the stakes of Ophiuchus are life and death, I really liked that the story was mainly focused on the emotional connections between the three main characters. My favorite aspect of Ophiuchus was the art style and how color was used to tell the story!

I can't wait to see more from these authors in the future, hopefully in a similar art style!

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

What are your favorite graphic novels? Let me know in the comments below!

-Laura


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Cannot be killed or swept aside

Happy Pride Month everyone! As most of you know, June is LGBT+ Pride Month in remembrance of the Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969, but nowadays it is mainly known for the Pride Parades that are held across the world throughout the month, while still reminding us that LGBT+ rights are  not yet equal across the world and that there is still much room for improvement. As June is coming to a close I wanted to make a list of my favorite books featuring LGBT+ characters, books I want to read, and books I'm looking forward to that are not yet released, to make sure we keep reading these books year round and not just during the month of June!

When I originally started mind-storming this post, I spent a few hours texting with Anna, before settling on this format. We talked about how to define an LGBT+ book: does it only mean books with LGBT characters? Can we count books who have openly LGBT+  authors but no openly LGBT+ characters? Why do we assume that a character is straight if they aren't openly LGBT+, and the same goes for the authors? During our conversation I realized that my reading list so far has been focused predominantly on LGBT+ texts by white authors, so I'm looking to further diversify my reading going forward.

Without further ado, let's get started!



LGBT Books I've Read



The Magicians by Lev Grossman


The series marketed as "Harry Potter for adults" begins with The Magicians and continues in The Magician King, and the trilogy officially ends with The Magician's Land. A new graphic novel, The Magicians: Alice's Story comes out on July 10th. I recently re-read the entire series and was lucky enough to grab an advance copy of Alice's Story while I was at Bookcon!

The books follow a group of magical college students as they search for the fictional land of Fillory. These characters are all struggling in their own ways, but are brilliantly intelligent, and like many of us who grew up with fantasy stories about so-called Chosen Ones, use fantasy as a form of escapism. Imagine their surprise when the stories of their childhoods begin to come to life around them!

In the books the main character Quentin Coldwater has a few gay thoughts about his friend Eliot, who is explicitly gay, as well as a drunken threesome with Eliot and another one of their friends. The other characters in the book are not explicitly LGBT+ and don't seem to be written in a way that they could be read as such.

The Syfy show by the same name went beyond the book in making the main cast much more racially diverse and most of them can be read as some form of LGBT+, even despite the (well deserved) criticism its most recent season received.



The Disasters by M.K. England 


The Disasters is a stand-alone novel about a rag-tag group of Space Academy wash-outs, centering on the pilot, Nax Hall. Their failure allows them to escape the worst act of terrorism in the history of space colonialism but it also makes them perfect scape-goats. As they flee across space, the crew has to find a way to trust themselves and each other. 

During the course of the story, Nax expresses interest in both male and female members of his crew, but doesn't specifically label his sexuality. I loved the chemistry that he had with both of his love interests and wish I could read more of their stories!



Carry On by Rainbow Rowell



Carry On is a spinoff from Rowell's earlier book Fangirl, and it follows the enemies-to-lovers trope as seen in the characters of Simon Snow and Baz Pitch, during their last year at Watford School of Magicks.

Carry On is by no means a perfect book, but I enjoyed it because it was laugh out loud funny and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, Wayward Son, when it comes out in September. Anna has talked about Carry On before here and here and she chose it as one of her favorite books back in 2017!



Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer


Too Like the Lightning is the first book in a tetralogy (the other books are Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle, and the not yet released Perhaps the Stars). I've reviewed the first book in the series previously here and read Seven Surrenders in 2018, but I'm still waiting for the last book to be published before I finish reading the series. 

As I mentioned in my original review, I had high hopes for the book when it came to LGBT+ content, but it managed to fall short of my wildest dreams. However, it was still an extremely interesting science fiction story with a societal structure unlike anything I'd ever read before, with its clear focus on gender as a performance rather than an innate aspect of a person and the wide definition for what a family could be. 



Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz



Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe holds a near and dear place in my heart because I'm pretty sure it was the first LGBT+ book I ever read. I reviewed it here back in 2016 when I needed a feel-good LGBT book and Ari and Dante sure does deliver on those counts!

Ari and Dante is the love story between two Mexican-American teenage boys who become friends first and boyfriends, whose relationship is able to span a cross-country move. It was so well-received when it came out that it won the Stonewall Book Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature in 2013! The author has announced that there's a sequel in the works but so far it does not have a release date.



The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee


I loved reading The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, the first book in a duology, which also includes The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (and if you preordered The Lady's Guide and live in the States you also had the opportunity to receive and read an extra novella: The Gentleman's Guide to Getting Lucky) I hauled The Gentleman's Guide when I received it in one of the Owlcrate boxes and named it as one of my favorite books of last year  but never got around to reviewing it.

The Gentleman's Guide was a fun romp through historic Europe featuring so much representation that when I first read through it, I was crying tears of happiness. The main character, Monty, is my favorite shameless flirt of a bisexual protagonist; his sister, Felicity, is a whip-smart asexual heroine (the second book focuses on her and I can't wait to read it!); and the love interest, Percy, is a disabled gay person of color. If you're looking for a summery gay road trip novel with a historical setting to boot, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue is the book for you!



Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor


Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is the most recent LGBT+ book that I've read. It was a wild, sexually explicit look into the life of a queer shapeshifter. As a warning, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, is not a young adult novel; instead it is adult literary fiction that plays with a lot of tropes from folk tales and veers into the territory of magical realism.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl alternates between the reality of the narrative of Paul's life as a college student and fairytales, and deals with changes of various types from the obvious shapeshifting abilities of the main character Paul, to referencing the trope of a changeling child, to a sister giving up her own identity to save her brother's life, and even reimagining the story of the Little Red Riding Hood in which the fox becomes the girl in the red cloak.

In terms of LGBT+ representation Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is chock-full of it. Paul is queer in every sense of the word: his shapeshifting, but also his relationships and how he moves through them in each body he makes for himself. When Paul shifts into the body of a girl he is only in relationships with other women and when he is in his "own" male body, he has relationships with other men. For a portion of the story Paul, in the form of a girl, moves into a commune full of other queer women. And finally, Paul has the magical powers that many trans or non-binary people unconsciously want: the ability to shift his body to fit whatever he identifies as in the moment. 


LGBT Books I Want to Read:

Check, Please! #Hockey Vol. 1 by Ngozi Ukazu


I picked up a copy of this book when I was in New York this summer for Bookcon, despite only knowing that it was a graphic novel, hugely popular, and LGBT+. Reading through the description of it on Goodreads, sky-rocketed Check, Please! to the top of my reading list.

Check, Please! is the first in a duology based on a webcomic of the same name, that follows a hockey playing vlogger as he moves from his hometown in Georgia to start as a freshman at college and playing on their hockey team. On top of that there's baking and a gay love story! What's not to be excited about? Also the title for Volume 2 was recently released and it sounds even more adorable than the first one: Check, Please! Vol. 2: Sticks and Scones and it will be released in April of 2020!




Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOzYA Stories edited by Michael Earp


Recently, I've seen myself drawn more and more to collections of short stories and Kindred is no different! Kindred features 12 original queer love stories all written by Australian authors who identify as queer. I am especially excited about Kindred because the author's identify with the characters they are writing about it, making it a collection of #OwnVoices fiction. I'm hopeful this collection presents diversity in a realistic manner, not just in hopes of gaining "points" with readers who are looking for diverse stories.



Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey


Magic for Liars is a just-released book (it came out at the very beginning of June) and I was originally drawn in by the cover! The bright colors made it seem like a perfect summer read, and I was even more intrigued when I read the synopsis and found out that it is urban fantasy (a genre I love) and it reminded me of The Magicians a little. Once I found out that multiple of the characters identify as queer and are spread across the spectrum of morality, I knew I needed to pick this book up as soon as possible. It's currently one of my top choices for books to take with me on my trip to Europe at the beginning of July — all I need to do anymore is buy a copy!

Magic for Liars follows the private detective Ivy Gamble when she goes to investigate a murder at the magical school her sister teaches at... the school Ivy herself never got to, or wanted to, attend. But as Ivy gets more and more entrenched in the mystery at the school, it seems increasingly difficult to return to her mundane life. 


Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan


This Asian inspired fantasy by Natasha Ngan, follows Lei, a girl from the lowest caste in her land as she's chosen to become one of nine trained to become the king's consort. Lei is haunted by losing her mother to the same fate she is in now, and during her training at the palace Lei makes the worst possible mistake she can in her situation: she falls in love. Her romance launches a plot that might change the future of her kingdom. 

I am really excited to read Girls of Paper and Fire because courtly fantasy is one of my favorite genres, and I rarely see lesbian love stories in fantasy novels. I also love reading fantasy stories that are not inspired by a quasi-medieval European setting. 



The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon


The Priory of the Orange Tree is another lesbian love story wrapped inside a fantasy world! Priory is a standalone adult novel with multiple viewpoint characters. Priory also seems to deal with how different cultures form different understandings of ancient events, which I think would be a really interesting form of cultural tension to examine. I have heard so many good things about Priory but the 800+ page count makes me scared to pick it up.



Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston


Red, White & Royal Blue is a romantic comedy about the First Son of the United States, Alex, and Prince Henry of Wales, who fall in love after being forced to pretend to be best friends. This book sounds so cute and dramatic and like a perfect summer read!



LGBT Books That are *Coming Out* That I Want to Read:


Wilder Girls by Rory Power


Wilder Girls is a female-centric retelling of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. The students of the Raxter School for Girls are placed under quarantine, and as their teachers die off one by one, the girls are left to fend for themselves on their island and to debate whether to break their quarantine or not.  Wilder Girls will be released on July 9th.



Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater


Call Down the Hawk is the first instalment in Stiefvater's new Dreamer trilogy, a spin off based on the character of Ronan Lynch from The Raven Boys saga. Ronan's boyfriend, Adam, has moved off to college and Ronan is still struggling with his "Dreaming" abilities — the power to pull objects from his dreams into the real world. Call Down the Hawk will be released on November 5th.



Tarnished Are the Stars by Rosiee Thor


Tarnished Are the Stars is a sci-fi adventure with an #OwnVoices author. Anna has an illegal clockwork heart and she supplies other sick people with black market medical technology. Her illegal activities catch the eye of the Commissioner's son who starts chasing her down. I received an ARC of Tarnished Are the Stars courtesy of Vicky Who Reads and I can't wait to start reading it and to review it closer to the release date. Tarnished Are the Stars will be released on October 15th.



Crier's War by Nina Varela


Crier's War is a fantasy story suggested for fans of Westworld and Game of Thrones, both of which I adore. The kingdom of Rabu is still feeling the after-effects of their latest war when automatons took control of the human race. Crier, a beautiful Automae, and Ayla, a human servant, struggle to find their place in their world and with each other. Crier's War will be released on October 1st.


Happy reading!
Laura



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As 2018 ground to a close, I started to reconsider how the blogger commemorates the end of an old year, and the beginning of a new one: mainly through the release of “best books of” and “most anticipated books of” lists. I was wondering how I should qualify which books I could list as my favorites of the year: should I choose out of all the books I read during 2018 or just out of the ones that were released in 2018 that I happened to read. Another question for me was how could I reasonably recommend my “favourite” books of the year when with the speed at which I read and the amount of books I read each year, I could barely remember the plots of most books I’d read, I only had a generic emotional response connected to each book. 

It was a conundrum for me, did I really want to end the tradition on our blog just because I was struggling to understand the concept of these years end posts? After weeks of silent debating by myself, and figuring out answers to these questions that satisfied me, I decided I would still release a list of books that were the ones that had left the biggest impact on me looking back on them now at the end of the year. 

So, here we go in no particular order:

  • The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee
  • Obsidio by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
  • The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
  • A Conjuring of Light by V.E. Schwab
  • Kingdom of Ash by S.J. Maas
  • Muumipappa ja meri by Tove Jansson


Anna’s top pics/most worthy of a mention from 2018:
In total I managed to read 21 books, which I am very glad about since I had a hard time finding joy in books at times this year. I was in a sort of rut and couldn’t find a book that would keep me so hooked that, I would constantly be craving just a small moment of free time when I would brew some tea and get lost in the words of a great read. That’s why the A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas  as a whole has been my most notable, favorite, life changing read this past year. It brought back not only my love for reading but my love for fantasy. I was, and still am, obsessed through and through.
And just as Laura said, I’m picking my favorite out of the four parts by reflecting on the generic feeling I get. The first was great but the second blew my mind so therefore A Court of Mist and Fury is my first.

Second I would like to mention a Finnish novel that actually won the Finlandia prize in 2016. Akvarelleja Engelin kaupungista by Jukka Viikilä taught my about the time of C.L. Engel and the building of our capitol Helsinki. I loved the journal entry style and depictions of Turku, where I now live, hit home with me.

The third book I’m going to raise to the podium here is the Swimmer Among the Stars by Kanish Tharoor, a book of short stories that I picked it in Paris from Shakespeare & Co. (I admit, the setting for reading this book did enhance my experience. But none the less I was inspired by these colorful stories.

Fourth and fifth were similar and I can’t really set them apart in my mind but both inspired me greatly and I remember them with a spark of happiness. You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero and #GIRLBOSS by Sophia Amoruso have helped shape my attitude and the way I perceive things (as did Homo Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari too by the way) and they were a big part of my nonfiction phase of 2018.

We hope you find amazing reads in 2019!
Laura and Anna
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Angelfall by Susan Ee is a dystopian/ post-apocalyptic fantasy novel unlike any I’ve read. Of course, there are the genre basics common to dystopian novels: the breakdown of society as we know it, a teenage girl who is somehow special as the main character. Comparisons can always be made and with a genre as pervasive as the Young Adult dystopian genre in science fiction and fantasy, Angelfall is bound to have similarities to other books in the genre. What separates Angelfall from the rest of the genre is that it is not humans who have destroyed the world, though we did have our hands in it, but rather angels.


The angels in Angelfall are straight out of the Old Testament. Sure, they’re exceedingly beautiful, but they are also terrifying. These are not the cherubs we are comfortable with, but harbingers of the apocalypse. Trying to find a balance between their human-like appearance and their clearly inhumane behaviour proves challenging to the main character Penryn, who constantly has to remind herself that her angelic companion, Raffe, is not human.

Whilst reading Angelfall I kept wishing that I were more familiar with the hierarchy of angels in Judeo-Christian mythology. Without this background knowledge however, plot twists were much more surprising (including the angel Raffe’s true identity…)

Angelfall is the first in the Penryn and the End of Days trilogy and I cannot wait to see what Ee has in store in the other two books.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

-Laura
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I first heard about Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning this past fall when I went to Worldcon in Helsinki with my aunt. There, Palmer won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. I filed the book away into my ever-growing list of books to read, hoping to eventually get to it. However, when I decided to do my Intro to Gender and Sexuality Studies final project about female authors in science fiction, I thought it was time to dive into Too Like the Lightning.

Too Like the Lightning is a far-future science fiction novel set in the year of 2454. The narrator Mycroft Canner, follows the events of a few days in the history of 2454, which will be continued in the next three books. Canner has found a young child who can animate toys into autonomus beings. This is extremely dangerous in a society, which has banned most discussion of religion.

The worldbuilding in Too Like the Lightning is superb. Firstly, the society no longer holds much value in the gender binary, with all the characters going by they/them pronouns. Secondly, rather than being tied by a national identity, citzens are allowed to choose which “Hive” they belong to. Hives are divided by the different vocational interests the groups represent. Finally, rather than having strict biological families, individuals can choose a group of people who share similar values with them, to form a “bash”. Members within the bash can then marry amd have children, but the bash as a whole is present in raising the children.


Too Like the Lightning had the potential to be an extremely well written socially conscious science fiction novel. With the agender characters, and loose family structures I was excited to see how the novel would cover what sounds like a millenial dream. However, the novel managed to fall short of my expectations on these accounts. There was a distinct lack of same-sex relationships, when with the lack of the traditional gender binary should be much more prevalent. Moreover, Canner decided to use gendered pronouns within his narrative. On a positive note, Canner did not assign the pronouns by sex, but rather by gender performance, which is progressive compared to our modern world. Despite these slight complaints, I found the story to be riveting and I cannot wait to read the second book in the series, Seven Surrenders, a copy of which is waiting for me back in the States.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

-Laura
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Science Fiction Bokhandeln -a book store.


Stockholm and the unexpected early come of fall-like weather

In trying to find creative ways to study I did a day trip to Stockholm to put my Swedish skills to the test. There, situated in the old town, one can find a book shop that is no doubt worth a visit. The store is specialized in sci-fi, fantasy and horror spiced with an abundance of related merchandise that also fills the shelves. Going upstairs a real heaven for role-play and classic board game fans opens up. A book or toy is sure to be found for readers (or just fans) of any age. This also includes comic geeks and movie collectors. Most of the books are in English, but also Swedish copies are sold (luckily for me!).






The staff is very nice and is able to give recommendations along with any other kind of help. They speak English very well, but this time around I managed in Swedish -another thing they where very kind with was my not-so-perfect verbal production. No problem.

I tend to walk by this cool story-lover's paradise and drop in whenever I find myself in Stockholm. It is fairly hard to miss since it has quite a central location on Västerlånggatan (Västerlånggatan 48). Hence I warmly, I emphasize, warmly recommend sparing the place a few minutes of your time (a fair warning: most likely a few minutes will get you nowhere as you'll be so mesmerized) even just for the experience. If you are elsewhere in Sweden, you might like to know that they also have locations in Göteborg and Malmö and I dare say that they are also worth popping into.

This last visit I made, I walked out as the happy owner of two new books: Cirkeln by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren (the name translates to the circle) and a beautiful classic to add to my collection's credence, Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie.








-Anna


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Having waited in line for half a year, I finally got the letter I had been waing for for so long. This letter was from the library kindly informing me that my book was ready for me to pick up. Finally my turn! Then I noticed the date. The letter had been on an adventure, or so it seems, as I received it just in time giving me only one day time to pick it up before someone else would get the pleasure. Gladly, I managed to get over this complication and now happily hold the book in my hand.

The prolonged wait was worth the while. Last night I turned the first page. Immediately I knew that I would enjoy this. I would devour this book. The first line and later followed by the first few logs (the book is written in the form of journal entries in a log) gave me a vast array of feelings and thoughts. Cleverly written, I am constantly given information without having to tramp through boring descriptions of the setting and protagonist. Instead, the first person narrative continuously radiates facts and characteristic traits about the personality of the writer and his surroundings through the entries. And I must say that my concentrating-hard-do-not-disturb-me, jammed facial expression vanished quite quickly thanks to the amusingly funny self-irony and paradoxical being of the whole situation.

Andy Weir's The Martian effortlessly leaped to the top of the pile of books on my nightstand.

Set on Mars the book is overflowing with scientifical explanations on how astronauts are transported to and from the Red Planet, how they live and more importantly, how to survive if you get stranded and are supposed dead by, well, everybody. All of this seems like it is deliberately written for me combining some of my passions. And not to mention the positive, "don't give up without a fight", attitude that just rubs off on the reader.

All I can say (note that I've only just embarked on this mission) is that I am super happy that I didn't go see the movie before reading the book, and that the first impression was indeed impressive. My winter break will be a success no matter what.


-Anna
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About Us

Hi! We're Laura and Anna, two twenty-something women who love reading! We originally met each other in Atlanta, GA, over 10 years ago. Since then, we moved back to our home country of Finland, and now that we are in university, Anna lives in Turku, Finland, studying medicine and Laura lives in Asheville, NC, studying literature.

We read in a wide variety of genres, including all forms of young adult fiction and some adult books as well. Laura tries to focus on fantasy, but sometimes her coursebooks get in the way, whereas Anna is happy to read anything other than her textbooks!

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