Tag Archives: YA

Birthday Twins Guest Post: Maya MacGregor and SAM SYLVESTER

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*dusts off the blog, tests the mic*

Happy Tuesday, dear readers, and thank you so much for checking out Books Beyond Binaries! Whether you are a follower or a first-time visitor, your time means so much to me, especially since the blog is technically on hiatus for 2022! That said, I knew when I took this time away that there were at least a couple of books on the horizon that I would absolutely have to make time and space for here. THE MANY HALF-LIVED LIVES OF SAM SYLVESTER is definitely one of them. I am so lucky and so honoured to be able to host author Maya MacGregor for a REALLY over-the-top, expansive guest post about this unique title.

I was fortunate enough to be connected with Maya through one of my agenting colleagues, and when I started learning about this book, I was so excited. As a non-binary, autistic fan of writing with contemporary themes and spooky speculative elements, this book is right in my wheelhouse! I couldn’t wait to get my hands on an ARC and chat with Maya about some of the things that got me so excited – like, for example, that GORGEOUS (and super duper queer coded) cover art, by Lauren Franklin??

Well, meeting Maya did not disappoint. They have been an absolute gem throughout this process, and incredibly generous with providing me with an incredible interview for this post, some character art, AND a tarot spread! Feel free to jump around and peruse this post, get to know Maya a little bit, get to know SAM SYLVESTER, and don’t forget to order your copy… because one of the serendipitous coincidences about this book is that TODAY is my birthday, and TODAY is also THE MANY HALF-LIVED LIVES OF SAM SYLVESTER’s book birthday!! Twinsss!

Meet Maya MacGregor

Rocking forest fae vibes, Maya MacGregor is an author, singer, and artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. A fluent Gaelic speaker, Maya is active in many community activities in Gaelic music as well as writing contemporary YA and adult fiction (as Emmie Mears and M Evan MacGriogair). Maya has a degree in history and is passionate about writing the stories for teens they wish had existed when they were younger and fills them with the type of people who have always populated their world. Their pronouns are they/them.

THE MANY HALF-LIVED LIVES OF SAM SYLVESTER is Maya’s first YA novel, and the best news? They have another on the way! THE EVOLVING TRUTH OF EVER-STRONGER WILL is coming from Astra Books for Young Readers in 2024.

Like Sam, Maya is autistic. Also like Sam, Maya spent much of life learning to mask autistic behaviours. Some of Maya’s special interests are: Gaelic (which you can now learn on Duolingo!), Dragon Age (especially Dragon Age Inquisition!), Gaelic song and poetry.

Interview with the Author

There isn’t a lot of non-binary representation for this age category of books yet, especially with a more nuanced view of identity. This is a story that I know younger me would have LOVED and seen myself in. How much did your own lived experiences inspire or factor into your writing this book?

A lot! I’ve lived in eight US states and three countries, and among them, both Oregon and Montana, but I went the opposite direction to Sam. We moved from Portland to Montana when I was 11, and it was a huge culture shock for me. I grew up in the height of the AIDS crisis with two mums, and homophobia was a formative factor in my life, even more so after that move. Many of Sam’s experiences are born of my own, though I (thankfully!) never experienced queerphobic physical violence. That said, I was fully aware when Matthew Shepard was murdered one state away from me, and I have really clear memories of being in PE and playing a game called “smear the queer”. I was so deeply in the closet myself and internalised heaps of homophobia and general queerphobia. Also, my biological mother is bi and when she and my mum broke up, my bio mother started seeing a man and was then ostracised from her queer friends, so there were a lot of things that kept me in the closet until I was almost thirty and a lot that I’m still unpacking within myself.

When I sat down to write Sam’s story, I really wanted to give them things I didn’t have. Even in Portland of the 90s, things were not a bastion of progressive values. Some of my friends weren’t allowed to come to my house because of my mums, and I remember so clearly how Heather Has Two Mommies was banned and the message that sent to me as a kid with two mums, that my family was so shameful we posed a danger even to read about. If I could go back and tell child me that I’d one day write a book that people want to ban in a dozen states, well. It fills me with a certain amount of ferocity and defiance. We’ve both come a long way and still know fear too well.

Things are scary right now on so many levels for trans people and the wider queer community, but so many more kids are able to be out now. I wrote Sam’s story as a way to celebrate that, to give Sam a community I wish I’d had: self-acceptance, acceptance at school, queer friends, a ride-or-die dad, school dances, a sense of belonging. Sam’s a love letter to my past self in many ways and even more so to the young people of today. We all deserve to exist and to live a full, whole life.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

What are your MC’s special interests, and can you tell us a little bit about what special interests are (for those who don’t know) and why you chose what you did for your character?

I do love Gaelic! As for dragons, it’s more the Dragon Age games, specifically, though I do appreciate a good dragon in general! “Special interest” is a term specific to neurodivergent communities, primarily with autism and ADHD, where a person’s interest in a topic is notable from neurotypical interest in its depth and intensity. That can look like a number of things–for me, when I finally got the chance to learn Gaelic, I basically spent twenty hours a week doing it for two years. I was conversational in a couple months and fluent after two years, and six months after that, I got an A-grade fluent Highers qualification. I read heaps of books, including a Gaelic grammar book written in Gaelic, phonology, hundreds of hours of recordings of songs, radio programmes, and more. I think from the outside, special interests can look like obsessions, and to a degree, they are, but it’s always tied up for me with profound respect and comfort.

Sam’s special interest is mainly half-lived lives, in remembering and learning about kids who didn’t get to become adults. They research stories of people and keep a scrapbook of these teenagers’ “half-lived” lives and treat them with reverence because Sam feels very strongly that they deserve to be remembered.

Originally, this was going to be literal past lives, but that vanished in an early revision. I was still in the early years of self-diagnosis when I first wrote the book, and in the course of the editorial process after it was acquired, I got my formal diagnosis, and part of that helped to reframe my own experiences as well as Sam’s, so I think that’s how it ended up as it did in the end!

Photo by Kirk Cameron on Unsplash

Masking plays a huge role in my life – so many people who say to me that I can’t possibly be autistic, because I don’t do whatever thing they think of as being typical for autistic people… when really, I’ve just worked really hard to mask over the course of my life. This obviously plays a role in Sam’s life and identity as well, and I’d be interested to know why you chose to address that aspect of autistic identity in your work.

Gosh, masking has been something so heavily on my mind for the past few years. With the pandemic, it’s become super evident how much energy I was expending masking when I was out in public and around people. Two years pretty much alone in my flat has left me without much of a mask–or maybe it just made the mask that much heavier to put on.

Masking sounds like a bit of a nebulous term, but for those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s essentially a set of altered behaviours, facial expressions, social scripts, habits, and strictures of bodily control that autistic and other neurodivergent people are forced to learn in order to be deemed acceptable by neurotypical society.

You may have heard that many autistics struggle with eye contact, so that’s an easy example. Masking that for an autistic person can be: forcing oneself to make eye contact (at great cost of emotional energy/focus/ability to participate fully in a conversation), training oneself to look between someone’s eyes or near their eyes to simulate eye contact, etc. It means suppressing stims (not bouncing when you’re happy about a good strawberry, not flapping a hand when there’s a too-loud noise) and constantly running processes to meet others’ specific expectations about what is acceptable existence and interaction.

I also have gotten a lot of the “you couldn’t possibly be autistic” lines, and it’s so frustrating because it so often comes from a level of ignorance that is both ignorant of the subject as a whole (what does autism look like) and ignorant of their own ignorance (ie: they don’t know what they don’t know and therefore think they know things they don’t). Which is a convoluted way of saying that we live in a world where clinicians exist in ignorance very frequently because of the historical failure to study autism outside of a very narrow phenotype (cis white men and boys), so the average person really isn’t aware of the diversity of autistic experience. My ability to mask impeded my diagnosis. It’s a double-edged sword–when we mask successfully, we are perceived to have low-to-nonexistent support needs, but none of us really mask well enough to not be perceived as somehow Other.

I think that’s what led me to leaning into that so much with Sam. I’ve been told so many times that I’m cold, self-centred, inconsiderate–almost always stemming from encounters with people where I was overstimulated, nearing meltdown, struggling socially or sensorily, or my social script slipped so I either didn’t know what questions to ask or how to seem appropriately engaged. I went undiagnosed so long that I was constantly just desperately confused at how hard I had to work to be acceptable to people–I really wanted Sam to meet people who would make space for their differences.

Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash

This book has aspects of queer contemporary, mystery, fantasy, literary, even a little bit of horror – what drew you to this kind of storytelling?

The book started out with a much heavier speculative element, so that was actually pared back a huge amount and shifted elsewhere (less literal past lives, more spooky!), and I’m rooted in fantasy as a writer. All of my published adult novels are fantasy, and it’s where I feel most at home.

I think what’s different about this one is that it’s my first ever YA, and while I read a lot of YA, I wasn’t aiming at a particular genre within the category and just went with what felt right. I love liminal spaces (probably because I’ve spent my whole life in them!), so this is what comes most naturally to me.

A lot of the process of this was me needing to learn mystery beats to shore up that aspect since despite enjoying mystery, I’m not generally a mystery author! But beyond that, it was treating the mystery itself like a character arc that would change everyone it touched. One of the interesting things to me is that in the first draft, Sam’s strength came more from their past selves, and I think rooting it in Sam’s present self made them a lot stronger as a character. In a way, I kind of have to laugh at that–I have a tendency to process My Own Stuff through what I write, and writing and revising this book felt like giving myself permission to exist within my own strength. 

Even though most of the time, people are super supportive, being a marginalized publishing professional can be super challenging. Your book is with a major publisher – Astra Books for Young Readers in the US – and that’s a really big deal! What has your experience been like working with an agent and an editorial team at a big publishing house on a story featuring protagonist who shares some of your marginalized identity experiences?

Wooo! We are legion!

“Super challenging” is definitely a way to put it. This book was on submission for almost two years before it sold, and while most of the rejections I got were sort of typical (“not for me”, etc.), I got a few that really stung on both the axes of queerness and autism. My agent has been so phenomenal. I’ve been with her for seven years now, and she’s had my back no matter what, to the point of pushing back against a rejection to educate the person a bit about autistic experience.

The book was originally acquired by Jes Negrón before Astra bought BMK, and I’ve known Jes for a decade (she was my first agent and has championed my work from the beginning of my career!), but Jes left the industry for personal reasons, and Suzy became my new editor. I was definitely super nervous. Having an established relationship with Jes, I felt so safe with her, and…erm. Autistic people aren’t known for being super sanguine about change! (It me; I am autistic people who are not sanguine about change)

But my team at Astra has been phenomenal. I’ve been really assertive if I thought an editorial note would serve to make Sam’s reactions and behaviours more neurotypical friendly, and Suzy has been so supportive in that and always willing to listen and dialogue with me–and if you’ve not heard, she just acquired my next YA, The Evolving Truth of Ever-Stronger Will, which also features an ND non-binary protagonist. So we’ll be working together again and actually just had our first editorial chat about the book last week! As we’ve moved into the publicity phase, my publicists have really thrown extraordinary support behind Sam, and for a book as personal as this on so many levels, I really could not ask for better people around me.

I think the biggest challenge for me has been my own fear. There were a couple of times in the editorial process where I got really scared that Sam’s responses weren’t translating to neurotypical readers (particularly with regard to how Sam doesn’t easily name emotions they’re feeling), but I explained alexithymia and was met with support and kindness.

Have you encountered other stories by authors who are non-binary and autistic, or stories that reflect those experiences in ways that feel meaningful to you?

My TBR list is a mountain. I know so many other non-binary autistic authors, though most I know write adult fiction: R.B. Lemburg, Bogi Takács (who happen to be married!), Ada Hoffman, Andi (A.C.) Buchanan, Merc Wolfmoor, A.J. Odasso, and a BUNCH of others I want to also list but am not sure how out they are on both axes. I love, love, love Merc’s short fiction, and I’ve been reading R.B.’s The Four Profound Weaves, which really speaks to me on several levels. I also have Andi’s Sanctuary on my Kindle to read ASAP–that one is I think in a similar vein to Sam Sylvester in that there are ghosts and healing and queer family.

There is a fantastic compilation of essays called Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism that includes essays by A.J. Odasso and Andi Buchanan (as A.C. Buchanan). It feels really validating to plug into those personal essays and see my community and myself reflected back at me.

What is one thing that you would want your readers to know about THE MANY HALF-LIVED LIVES OF SAM SYLVESTER? Similarly, what do you wish you could tell adults who are going to choose this book to put in a young reader’s hands?

Oof. With things as fraught as they are politically and trans lives–particularly trans kids’ lives–at the eye of the storm yet again, I want to first of all say to my fellow trans and non-binary people that I know I don’t speak for you. Sam’s experience isn’t everyone’s experience, because we are all different, but I hope you will find something of yourself in the pages of this book. It’s for you no matter what because you deserve to be here and accepted without fear.

For adults? You never know what’s going on in the minds of the kids you interact with unless they tell you. Books obviously can’t make us anything we’re not already–if that were true, I’d be cis and straight for sure. 😛 But books can remind us that we’re not alone, and being young and queer can be incredibly lonely, especially if we’re in a place trying to legislate us out of existence. I hope that Sam’s story can be someone’s friend when they need one. Will you help me introduce them?

The cover art for your book is super evocative, and the figure portrayed is also queer-coded. Did you have any input into your cover design, and do you feel that it conveys the mood that you were trying to capture with your narrative?

First of all, I have to shout out the amazing Lauren Franklin, who is a Minneapolis-based Black illustrator and whose work is absolutely phenomenal. When I saw their portfolio, I about fell over. I had a surprising amount of input into the design, which I truly appreciate–that’s almost never true in traditional publishing!

The initial sketch was close to this, but the sky was plain blue. The tattoo bleeding into the sky was part of the revision notes, and I basically asked them to lean into their own style as much as possible–they turned around and came back with this, and it’s so perfect. I get so many compliments on the cover, and I’m just like Lauren! It’s Lauren! They’re AMAZING!

The art absolutely hits every note I was looking for, capturing Sam’s inner mind as well as their outward appearance, and I couldn’t be happier.

Last but not least, whenever I feature a non-Black author on my blog, I always ask for a book recommendation that’s by a Black author from them. This can be ANY book by a Black author that you think others would enjoy!

Oooh, yes! I’ve been reading Namina Forna’s The Gilded Ones, and I’m so hooked. I’ve been lamenting my work schedule keeping me from reading more. The prose is super evocative, and the worldbuilding is lush–it’s the exact type of second-world fantasy I love to, like, cannonball into and stay there.

Also on my TBR right now is C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken–they’re a pal, and I’ve had the book on my friend shelf for far too long, and it’s been watching me. >.> I think that book will be a great tonal follow-up for The Gilded Ones.

New Moon Mini-Tarot Spread

When I asked Maya if they would be willing to do something creative for this post, they REALLY delivered. At the time, it was the April new moon (both our lives have been a little… hectic… lately), so they did a mini-tarot spread for themself and Sam. They provided me with these gorgeous photos that speak for themselves, and they used the Weaver Tarot, a deck with an aesthetic that’s just perfect for Sam!

Maya drew three cards: one for Sam (seeker of wands), one for them (the fool 🙃) and one for their career going forward (five of cups reversed). 

Character Art by Paisley Wilson

Maya gave me ONE final treat to share with our readers – but this one is a great one. Their friend, Paisley Wilson, created this gorgeous art piece of two of the characters from THE MANY HALF-LIVED LIVES OF SAM SYLVESTER – Sam, the MC, and Shep. I hope that you love it as much as I do, and I want to wish a final HAPPY BOOK BIRTHDAY to SAM SYLVESTER and Maya MacGregor!

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

Victories Greater than Death

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I am always humbled by the connections that I get to make with incredible new authors and emerging artists through this platform. Once in a rare while, I also get to connect with authors who I have admired for a long time. This week, I am super excited – and still kind of in disbelief? – that I get to share an interview that I had the pleasure of conducting with the iconic Charlie Jane Anders.

Charlie Jane Anders, photo by Sarah Deragon.

If Charlie Jane Anders is a new name for any of you reading this, buckle in, because you are in for a wild ride. I was excited to get to chat with Charlie Jane about her upcoming YA debut, the first book in a trilogy, Victories Greater Than Death, which comes out TOMORROW with Tor Teen! You still have a little while to pre-order! Run! (And don’t stop running.) This book is (if I’m counting right), Charlie Jane’s ninth novel-length work, but she is prolific and has won an awe-inspiring number of awards for her longer works, but also her short fiction: the Emperor Norton Award, a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, a William H. Crawford Award, a Theodore Sturgeon Award, a Locus Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. Nbd. (Except, VERYbd).

I had the pleasure of reading an early copy of Victories, which was great, because I full-blown squealed when I heard that Charlie Jane was working on a YA project. Although I do love speculative work, for whatever reason I am a reader that struggles with worldbuilding – so, often, YA speculative is much easier for me to wrap my mind around. That said, though, I’m not an Epic Fantasy person… so sometimes, YA speculative that appeals to my interests can be a challenge to find. I was lucky, because (unsurprisingly to me at least) Victories delivered on everything that I wanted it to.

Like I told Charlie Jane before I interviewed her, I’m not usually an intergalactic-war person, but the characters and the voice of this novel were irresistible. Everything about this story is just fun. As an anxious and autistic person, the protagonist’s best friend, a character called Rachael, was highly relatable. Her needs were represented in ways that were charming and challenging and often not well-executed in fiction, and for me, it was a joy to follow her through this story. Still, the real beauty of this book for me was the absolutely bonkers diversity of the characters. The pub copy comps the book to Dr. Who meets Star Wars, and I grew up watching so much monster of the week TV that the levity of the worldbuilding really struck a chord with me as a reader, even though I’m not a science fiction buff. Suffice to say, I would recommend this book up and down to a wide variety of readers, and I’m thrilled that Charlie Jane agreed to chat with me about it in this space. Without further ado…


The cover of VICTORIES GREATER THAN DEATH.

You are becoming – if you’re not there already – a prolific author, and most of your work has speculative elements. This book is a bit of a departure, though, in that it is your first book intended explicitly for young readers. I have two questions about this. First, what came first – the story, or the intention to write for young readers?

I started thinking about writing a young adult book in spring 2016, around the time I quit my day job to write full time. I had been noticing for a while that YA fiction was getting more action-adventure-oriented, like there were more books being published like Warcross or Want or Illuminae. YA seemed to be taking a turn towards being a place where you could do something super fun and exhilarating. So I started to think about what I would like to do in a YA, and immediately started to remember all those times when I was a teenager, when I just wished a spaceship would swoop down out of the sky and come take me away from this planet. That led to imagining the story of a girl who’s actually the clone of an alien hero, and her efforts to reclaim her heritage and seize her destiny. 

Second, did you find it difficult to adapt your writing style to the voicey, confessional tone that is so characteristic of YA works right now (because I felt like you nailed it)?

In terms of the tone, that took a TON of work. I sat down with a huge pile of my fav YA books and paged through them, getting a sense of which were first person and which were third person, and how they worked on a sentence level. It took a ton of trial and error to get Tina’s voice right, and I had to keep coming back to the idea of her being snarky and funny, but not ironic or wry or self-mocking the way adults usually are. And once I handed in a complete draft, I worked a lot with my editor, Miriam Weinberg, to tighten the book and speed up the pace and boost the emotion in a lot of crucial places. 

Photo by Vincentiu Solomon on Unsplash

There is such a wide range of characters in this book, and it has a huge cast. Humans, clones, aliens, teens, and adults, all with very distinct aesthetics, cultures, bodies, identities, etc. Do you have an absolute favourite, or one who you relate to the most? What was the most enjoyable part about creating such a rich and diverse cast?

I had so much fun creating all of these different aliens and creatures. It was a total dream come true, and I spent hours and hours cooking up complicated histories and backstories for the different alien worlds and societies, as well as the galaxy as a whole. And then I also spent hours and hours doing research and talking to people for my human supporting cast, since they come from all over the world. I definitely had different characters on different days, but overall my favorite character probably ended up being Rachael — I love how she just wants to hide away and draw when she’s on an alien ship in the middle of a space battle. 

One of the norms in this book is that the characters consistently introduce themselves with their pronouns, and many of the characters use non-binary pronoun options or no pronouns at all. This isn’t prominent in many books. What was your rationale behind that choice, and did you struggle with it through the editorial process at all? 

I honestly can’t remember how I decided that everyone should introduce themselves with their pronouns. I was just thinking about the fact that all of these aliens are speaking their own languages and it’s being translated into English, and so it made sense to me that a translator could also give you other important information — like someone’s pronoun. And once I started doing it, it just made sense. I made sure to mention that not everybody actually “hears” the pronouns spoken out loud, the way Tina does. It works differently for different people. But this felt like a good way to be introducing a lot of human and alien characters, some of whom might not have genders or other identifiers that a human would be able to figure out at a glance. It also went along with the overall theme of the book, of respecting other people’s identities while you try to figure out your own.  

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

As a literary agent who represents speculative authors across age categories, I am constantly hearing from editors that sci fi in YA is a super tough sell, and that they have trouble getting these works approved by their acquisitions boards. In comparison to your other works, what was the process like finding a home for VICTORIES, and what made you choose to write sci fi for this age group? 

I always hear people say that science fiction is a hard sell in YA as well, but then you look at series like The Hunger Games, Illuminae, Divergent, the aforementioned Warcross, and a bunch of others, and it’s clearly not accurate. That said, I am very nervous about launching a YA science fiction book, just because I’m aware of that widespread misconception, and I’m worried it’ll keep people from offering the book to kids. I think especially right now, it’s super important to get young people (and everyone) fired up about science and exploration and discovery. Luckily, the folks at Tor Teen were super excited to delve into this space-opera universe—and I think the fact that it stands out a bit is not a bad thing. 

If an educator was going to teach your book in a high school or college creative writing class, what do you hope students would take away from that experience? Similarly, what do you wish you could tell educators who are going to choose this book to put in a young reader’s hands?

Wow, I can’t ever think about people teaching my books to creative-writing students, except as an example of what *not* to do. 🙂  In the case of Victories, I hope they’d be interested in the voice, like we talked about before, and the way I use humor and feels to add to the suspense. (Or at least, I hope I do that.) For high-school teachers generally, I would hope they’d talk about the themes of post-colonialism and what it means to be a hero. 

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

Being a marginalized publishing professional can be super challenging once in a while. You have worked with a few different imprints and editors over the course of your career so far. What has your experience been like working with an agent and an editorial team at a big publishing house? What would you say the most fulfilling part of this process was, and what was the biggest challenge?

I’ve been so lucky with Russ Galen and with everyone at Tor, including Miriam Weinberg and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Everybody has been incredibly supportive and understanding, and nobody blinked when I said I wanted to include so many queer characters in my space opera universe. The most fulfilling part has probably just been talking to Miriam about the characters and the story and how to make them pop — and the biggest challenge has just been breaking in as a YA author, especially during a time when school visits and other in-person appearances are not possible. 

Last, but not least, when I’m covering a non-Black author, I ask them to recommend a book by a Black author to go alongside their post. Would you mind sharing a rec with me?

Three that I’ve read and loved recently come to mind: The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus, A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow, and Legendborn by Tracy Deonn. 

Covers of THE STARS AND THE BLACKNESS BETWEEN THEM, A SONG BELOW WATER, and LEGENDBORN.

Victories Greater Than Death comes out on April 13th, 2021 from Tor Teen. If you enjoyed this interview, you can find Charlie Jane Anders on her Hugo Award winning podcast with co-host Annalee Newitz, our opinions are correct.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

Meet A.J. and Ana!

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I grew up as a sports-loving tomboy in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and one of my earliest memories is of my toddler body being stuffed into a snowsuit and skates, and thrust onto the ice by my grandfather. I leaned my torso on the seat of a rickety wooden chair that scraped along in front of me as I learned to clop my way around a worn rink and lots of bumpy pond surfaces. When I got steady enough on my feet, being a girl, I was funnelled into figure skating classes, while my masculine peers were shuffled off to hockey. I did local competitions until I was 10, when a knee injury from horseback riding kept me on crutches for a year, and I was relegated to recreational skating for the rest of my days. Still, ice skating has been a huge source of joy in my life, and every winter I still haul my neon purple and pink skate bag, monogrammed with my dead name, out to the rinks in Toronto. I wear knee pads these days.

The cover of The Shiny Skates, by Elizabeth Koda-Callan.

When I first came across A.J. Sass’ book, ANA ON THE EDGE, the first thing that came to mind was one of my 1990s childhood favourites, a book called THE SHINY SKATES, by Elizabeth Koda-Callan. Truly a relic of the 90s (although it was reprinted in 2004 by Workman Publishing), this was part of the Magic Charm books – a series of chapter books that came with charm necklaces for the reader to wear along with their characters. I wore mine religiously.

Around the time that THE SHINY SKATES was released was also when American Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding’s career came to a close due to her possible involvement in a scandalous event in which her skating rival, Nancy Kerrigan, was assaulted and injured at the rink. Both skaters competed in the 1994 Olympics, where Kerrigan won a silver medal and Harding finished eighth. I still remember how public perception of Tonya Harding and her less feminine presentation on the ice coloured my entire experience of learning how to skate as a young, gender non-conforming athlete. (If you want to learn more about Harding and her story, journalist Sarah Marshall wrote a great piece about her, and later did a two-part podcast episode about her on You’re Wrong About.)

The cover of Ana on the Edge, by A.J. Sass

ANA ON THE EDGE is an #OwnVoices middle grade novel about a non-binary figure skater, written by a non-binary figure skater, and all I can think every time I think about this book is how the world has changed since I was a kid. I can’t even imagine how life-changing it would have been for me to have gotten my hands on this book back in the body-shaming mid-90’s, when I was mortified by how my muscular, chubby body looked in my skin-tight, sequinned figure skating dresses… if Tonya Harding couldn’t pull them off, how could I be expected to? The gentle exploration of gender, identity, and self-perception that is navigated with such charm in ANA ON THE EDGE could have been a balm to my soul back then, as it is now.

I am so honoured that author and figure skater A.J. Sass was so generous and receptive when I reached out to see if they would collaborate on a post for this site about ANA, and my interview with them is below. I would be remiss not to mention that not only is A.J. an autistic author with an interest in neurodivergence representation in fiction, they are a much more accomplished skater than I could ever dream to be! Aside from writing books, A.J. is a US Figure Skating double gold medalist in Moves in the Field and Free Skate, a silver medalist in Ice Dance, and a member of the 2018 national bronze medalist and 2019 national silver medalist Masters synchronized skating team, IceSymmetrics. (Insert my fan face here!) Now living in San Francisco, ANA is their debut novel, and it was released in October, and is available for purchase now!

Covers of King and the Dragonflies, Black Flamingo, and This is my America.

When I asked A.J. what books by Black authors they would recommend alongside ANA, they struggled to narrow it down to three choices… Kacen Callendar’s KING AND THE DRAGONFLIES (a fan favourite in these parts), THE BLACK FLAMINGO, by Dean Atta, and Kim Johnson’s THIS IS MY AMERICA.

Interview with A.J. Sass, author of ANA ON THE EDGE

A.J. Sass, author of ANA ON THE EDGE.

When I first encountered ANA ON THE EDGE, I was so thrilled for two reasons. One, there isn’t a lot of #OwnVoices non-binary representation for this age group yet, and two, I would have loved a book like this growing up. What do you think your young self would have thought of Ana and of this story?

I definitely didn’t know I was non-binary when I was Ana’s age. In fact, I’m not even sure if the term had been coined yet, officially! What I do know is that I would’ve gravitated toward a book like this on the shelves because I was an avid fan of skating as a kid. I started group class lessons all the way back when I was seven. And I think reading about Ana, a rising star in the sport of figure skating who realizes she* is uncomfortable with some of the gendered aspects within the sport, would have been revelatory for me as someone who always felt a little prickle of discomfort when I encountered similar binary components as a skater.

I can’t know for sure what I would have thought of Ana, or Hayden, her new friend who is a transgender boy, but I suspect that seeing a mirror of my own feelings reflected in someone else would have given me a solid starting point to exploring my identity much earlier in my life.

*Just as a heads up, I’m referring to Ana with female pronouns because Ana hasn’t chosen a new set by the end of the story. Non-binary people use a variety of pronouns, like gender neutral and even male and female pronouns in some instances (e.g., I use he/him and they/them pronouns interchangeably). In Ana’s case, she’s still exploring what feels best for her.

Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash

You’ve competed in figure skating, ice dance, and synchronized team skating. How did your own experiences in this artistic sport factor into your work on ANA?

As I mentioned earlier, I started skating when I was a child and I remain active in the sport now. As a kid, my discomfort associated with wearing skating tights and dresses was more of a subconscious undercurrent rather than something I was actively aware of. I think kids today are often more aware that the LGBTQIA+ community exists, even if they don’t know precisely how they fit into it. So I made sure to reflect that in Ana’s narrative, even though it took me until adulthood myself to pinpoint why I was uncomfortable with skating’s gendered components.

One of my favorite memories in the sport is of the friendships I made, and the moments my training-mates and I would goof off in between lessons during practice. Because at its core, skating is a really fun activity, even for kids like Ana who are very serious about their training. An early scene where Ana’s best friend, Tamar, challenges her to perform a cartwheel on ice comes directly from my own experiences. Here’s some proof:

From A.J. Sass’s instagram.

Being a marginalized publishing professional can be super challenging. Your book is with a Big 5 publisher – one of the Hachette imprints – and that’s a really big deal! What has your experience been like working with an agent and an editorial team at a big publishing house on a story featuring a protagonist who is questioning their gender? What would you say the most fulfilling part of this process was, and what was the biggest challenge?

I feel like I’ve been supremely fortunate to work with my agent, Jordan Hamessley, and the entire team at New Leaf, as well as ANA’s publishing team at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

Working with Jordan has been wonderful and affirming. An example: When we were preparing to go on submission with ANA, Jordan made sure I was comfortable being out as a non-binary author before pitching me as such to editors. Now that ANA is published, I absolutely see where Jordan was coming from since the vast majority of author panels I’ve been on and interviews I’ve done have referenced my experience of being non-binary in some way. I’m proud to be out and open about who I am, but I definitely appreciate Jordan preparing me to think about how that choice would impact the way people approach questions about me and my book.

My editorial team at Little, Brown has also been fantastic. Even so, working on a story with a non-binary protagonist who hasn’t made a decision to change her pronouns yet by the end of the story presented a challenge for all of us.

Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash

About a year ago, right around the time we were finalizing the book summary that would appear on ANA ON THE EDGE’s dust jacket, the use of female pronouns in reference to Ana started feeling off to me. I really couldn’t explain it at first. We’d used female pronouns for the Publishers Weekly announcement when ANA first sold and we used them on internal email communications as well. So why was it bothering me to see them on the inside flap of what would eventually become the book’s dust jacket?

Eventually, I realized my concern was that prospective readers would be unfamiliar with the nuances of Ana’s story and what it even means to be non-binary. I worried that cisgender readers would see those female pronouns and immediately make the assumption that Ana is a girl who decides to become non-binary, rather than a non-binary kid discovering that’s who they’ve always been.

Then I proceeded to worry that my publisher would be annoyed if I asked to change the wording after I’d already approved the final copy. But ultimately, this became one of the most fulfilling aspects of the publishing process for me because my editors were incredibly receptive to my feedback. They were happy to rework the copy so that pronouns aren’t referenced at all on the dust jacket, or marketing and other promotional materials. Now I feel like readers can enter Ana’s world without any misconceptions about gender identity and come to their own conclusions as they immerse themselves in the story.

Photo by Joseph Costa on Unsplash

In this story, you decided to include not only Ana, a non-binary protagonist, but you also introduced readers to Hayden, a transgender boy. Was it important to you to include more than one trans character in this book, or did that just happen organically as you were writing? In addition, how did you make sure that you were doing both of these identities justice in your representation of them in this book?

It was an intentional choice to include two trans characters because I wanted to highlight how no two trans experiences are the same. Hayden’s known who he is for a while by the time he and Ana meet, whereas Ana is just starting to explore the layers of her identity. As I touched on in an earlier answer, I think it can sometimes be a revelation to see an aspect of yourself reflected in someone else. That’s what happens when Ana meets Hayden: Hayden’s identity doesn’t match Ana’s precisely, but she recognizes a shared commonality, one that spurs her to dig deeper and learn more about herself.

In terms of representation, I’ve identified as a transgender man and non-binary at various points in my life. There are parts of my experience with those two identities in the representation of both Hayden and Ana. Since trans experiences can vary greatly from person to person, I also had authenticity readers provide further feedback.

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER on Unsplash

What is one thing that you would want your readers to know about ANA ON THE EDGE? Similarly, what do you wish you could tell adults who are going to choose this book to put in a young reader’s hands?

My answer here applies to both kids and adults: It’s okay not to have everything figured out about yourself all at once. It’s fine if you do, of course, but I think something I struggled with when I was younger was a concern that I might change my mind later or realize I was wrong about my identity after I’d already come out to my friends and family. I worried about burdening others if I had to come out again and ask them to use a name and set of pronouns that fit me better.

People aren’t static. We are constantly changing and evolving. The same can be true about identity, and there is no shame in coming to a better understanding of yourself, no matter what age you are. I hope Ana’s story helps readers embrace uncertainty and consider it an opportunity to get to know themselves even better.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

Havoc and Happiness!

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Ace Week

As some of you may already know, this week is Ace Week, an annual tradition highlighting identities in the asexual and aromantic communities, which are part of the LGBTQ2S+ spectrum. It’s an important week for me, because although I am allosexual, I identify as nebularomantic, a neurodivergent aromantic identity. What it means is that I can’t (and don’t) emotionally differentiate between types of love like alloromantic neurotypical people do. For me, platonic and romantic love feel exactly the same.

The nebularomantic flag.

I only began to understand this about myself in 2019. As I began to unpack what that meant for me, while also navigating the unraveling of a close friendship and an abusive partnership, so many things in my life began to make more sense to me. Complicated relationships that I had had from the time I was a child, and often their breakdowns, became so much more simple to parse and understand when I was able to piece together this part of myself. Although I had identified with various other identities in the LGBTQ2S+ community for a long time, I could suddenly identify that my lack of understanding about my nebularomantic identity is the one that has caused me the most pain. My coming into the Ace community was laced with heartbreak, as much as relief. I have come to learn that for so many Ace people, this is often the case.

My wish for Ace Week is that people who do not share identities with the people in the Ace community, especially other queer people, will take the time to learn about what Ace identities are and what they mean to us. Our relationships can look very non-normative, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t fulfilling and precious and rich with meaning.

…and what better way to learn about identities different from your own than through books?! There are a few places to find these books, since they can be a bit tricky to pin down. First, you can check out the Aromantic and Asexual Characters in Fiction Database, always linked on our resources page. Second, check out this new list of books with asexual main characters, assembled by Fadwa, the rad Moroccan book blogger behind Word Wonders. And last but not least, a specific recommendation: Unburied Fables. This independently published short story collection features works by over a dozen a-spec authors, including my friend Rose Sinclair, founder of F*ck Yeah Asexuals, who popularized the term “allosexual”. 50% of all the book’s proceeds are donated to the Trevor Project.

The cover of Unburied Fables.

CeCe Reviews WHITE IVY

As always, I am honoured to welcome back author, friend, and fellow literary agent, Cecilia Lyra, to this space! CeCe is a Brazilian reader and a fierce, brilliant feminist living in Canada, and this week I’m so glad to share her review of White Ivy by Susie Yang. White Ivy will be released on November 3rd, and is available to pre-order now!

The cover of White Ivy.

What makes a reader fall in love with a novel?

White Ivy by Susie Yang is the story of Ivy Lin, “a thief and a liar—but you’d never know it by looking at her.” (That’s one-line gold right there. It’s what made me want to read this book.) The eldest in her immigrant family, Ivy grew up on the wrong side of town. She learned how to steal (and otherwise take advantage of situations) from her scrappy grandmother. She also learned how to covet, to aspire. And her main ambition? A life entirely different from her own.

It is no surprise then that Ivy sets her sights on Gideon Speyer, the golden boy of an old-moneyed family. Except, as a teen, Ivy doesn’t stand a chance of dating Gideon. Years later, however, Ivy—now a kindergarten teacher—runs into Gideon’s sister, a chance encounter that, as a little luck and a lot of manipulation would have it, evolves into Ivy becoming Gideon’s girlfriend. For a moment, it appears that Ivy has made it. She’s left her life—her pathetic, embarrassing, poor existence—behind. And then, a figure from her past re-emerges—one who sees the true Ivy, the self she has so deftly managed to hide from everyone else—and threatens her new, golden life. But, in addition to being a thief and a liar, Ivy is a survivor. And what she aims to protect isn’t just her life—it’s her newfound status (which, to Ivy, are one and the same—what’s the point of life otherwise?).

I read this novel compulsively. As a character, Ivy is dark and twisted and haunting, which makes readers consider the parts of themselves that are precisely that. It deals with ambition and deception, all while exploring a woman’s coming-of-age, a love triangle, and the immigrant experience. I was absorbed in Ivy’s journey. Wholly invested in it. I felt everything she was feeling—and Ivy, being a fully fleshed out, unreservedly human character, felt things that were immoral and illogical. I applaud this. I am so done with boring, moralistic characters. I loved that Ivy was flawed and I loved how she was flawed. Yang has written a wonderfully immersive novel.

Which brings me back to my initial question. What does make a reader fall in love with a novel? The simple answer is: a good story. Of course, what make a good story is a whole other matter. In a way, a good story is like magic. It’s the impossible made real. But, much like a magic trick, when we break down the elements that make up a good story, we are able to understand how it came to be. A hypnotizing voice. Lively, engaging pace. Crisp, natural dialogue. A surprising yet inevitable ending—to name a few. Storytelling feels like magic, but it is a craft, and, like any craft, it can be understood logically, even if it is experienced fantastically. In examining WHITE IVY under these lenses, I can very much see what made me fall in love with it. It has all the makings of a good story.

And yet.

Throughout the novel, the reader is prompted to ask themselves, Why is Gideon with Ivy? Indeed, this question is clearly at the back of Ivy’s mind. Like Ivy, we are afraid she will lose him, that she will lose the life she has craved—and fought—for so long. It is a fear that consistently informs her behavior and choices. It is a question we speculate about and, in novels, one counts on receiving answers to questions, particularly at the end. It’s one of the ingredients of what makes a good story: a reveal. And, sure enough, at the end of WHITE IVY, we find out why Gideon is with Ivy. The reveal is delivered. And, sadly, it was disappointing.

I won’t spoil it, but I will say this: it felt device-y. At best, lazy and unimaginative. At worst, offensive. I will also say that I do not fault Yang—at least no more than I fault every author out there (myself included). Whether we want to or not we are a product of the heteronormative, white supremacist patriarchy that rules our world, which means we often fall prey to its pervasive teachings. Even the most progressive, enlightened human has been brainwashed by the system and, sometimes, these prejudices unconsciously make their way into our stories. I do not know Susie Yang, but I believe it’s possible—likely, actually—that she did not notice the problematic plot reveal at the end of her novel and that, if she had, she would’ve addressed it in a responsible manner. I know I’ve seen problematic aspects in my own writing and hope to continue to see them, as that will mean I continue to grow. My criticism is not without compassion. In fact, it is imbued with it.

What makes a reader fall in love with a novel? A good story.

And I’m very much looking forward to Susie Yang’s next novel.

Feature: HAVOC AND HAPPINESS

Cover of Havoc and Happiness

I am super thrilled to get to feature Canadian LGBTQ2S+ author Wren Handman’s newest YA light fantasy title Havoc and Happiness on the blog today, on the day of its release! Happy book birthday!!! We decided to have a little fun with this post, but all you really need to know is this: Queer. Monster. Hunter.

…or, that’s all I needed, anyway. This book follows undead MC Michaela Peters, as she navigates a new school, new powers, and horrible monsters that shift depending on what people’s imaginations have the capacity to conjure.

The cover of a book of Mad Libs, called Goofy Mad Libs: World’s Greatest Word Game.

Now. Do you all remember Mad Libs? Well, we thought it might be fun to create a mad lib of an action scene from Havoc and Happiness to give to a couple of our contributors, to give BBB’s readers a silly preview of this rad new book. Thank you so much to Jack and Eddie (from reddietoread) for humouring Wren and I in this project intended to bring a little light during a weird, weird time. The scenes are below! In the meantime, I asked Wren to recommend a book by a Black author for this post, and she wanted to shout out one that’s on her TBR: The Weight of the Stars, by K. Ancrum, which is a rad YA lesbian sci-fi romance that was released by Imprint in 2019.

The cover of The Weight of the Stars.

Mad Lib: Version One

The two of them face off with a sort of ‘you wouldn’t dare’ look. Cade takes a long, deliberate swallow of his coke. Devin starts to relax, but then Cade goes on the attack.

“I guess you wouldn’t have heard,” Cade tells me, not breaking eye contact with Devin. “But Devin asked the apple last year so he would get a telephone.”

“Cade has a tattoo of bookcase!”

“Devin owns sixteen fish!”

“Cade had to eat  people to come to his birthday.”

“Devin joked Mr. Stephens to turn his basketball!” to a house!”!”

“Cade—”

“I need to run!” I holler into the stream of abuse, and hurl myself up from the book. I don’t look back, but I picture the two of them not even slowing down as they continue to fight.

I linger in the bathroom, putting on lipstick, fixing my hair, anything to avoid going back outside. I’m running out of things to do to my face when I hear a tall crash from the dining area. I rush back into the main room to find Cade and Devin both looking long and helping our waitress clean up some broken dishes.

“What happened?” I ask, picking up the handle of a broken mug and heaping it on top of the tray.

“They got into a fight about who was paying the bill,” the waitress, whose nametag reads “Kelly,” explains.

“I am so green,” I tell her, handing over the plate. “I don’t know what on Earth got into them. They’re acting like cakes.”

“Oh, honey. Teenaged boys and their fishes,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You just be careful—I’m sure it seems all cold, them fighting over you, but it can go bad fast.”

“Trust me, I don’t think it’s slimy,” I moan. “What’s a foot called when there’s only one girl?”

“A disaster?” she teases, and pushes me back towards my water. I drag my feet crossing back through the restaurant. I can’t believe what I’ve gotten myself into.

Mad Lib: Version Two

The two of them face off with a sort of ‘you wouldn’t dare’ look. Cade takes a long, deliberate swallow of his coke. Devin starts to relax, but then Cade goes on the attack.

“I guess you wouldn’t have heard,” Cade tells me, not breaking eye contact with Devin. “But Devin spat the frying pan last year so he would get a statuette.”

“Cade has a tattoo of foil!”

“Devin owns sixteen washing machines!”

“Cade had to slice  people to come to his surprise party.”

“Devin won Mr. Stephens to turn his armoire!” to a germ!”!”

“Cade—”

“I need to utilize!” I holler into the stream of abuse, and hurl myself up from the skyscraper. I don’t look back, but I picture the two of them not even slowing down as they continue to fight.

I linger in the bathroom, putting on lipstick, fixing my hair, anything to avoid going back outside. I’m running out of things to do to my face when I hear a squeamish crash from the dining area. I rush back into the main room to find Cade and Devin both looking unbelievable and helping our waitress clean up some broken dishes.

“What happened?” I ask, picking up the handle of a broken mug and heaping it on top of the tray.

“They got into a fight about who was paying the bill,” the waitress, whose nametag reads “Kelly,” explains.

“I am so calm,” I tell her, handing over the plate. “I don’t know what on Earth got into them. They’re acting like stuffed animals.”

“Oh, honey. Teenaged boys and their oceans,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You just be careful—I’m sure it seems all bright, them fighting over you, but it can go bad fast.”

“Trust me, I don’t think it’s ridiculous,” I moan. “What’s a potato called when there’s only one girl?”

“A disaster?” she teases, and pushes me back towards my lamp. I drag my feet crossing back through the restaurant. I can’t believe what I’ve gotten myself into.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

Miss Meteor Blog Tour

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I know I’m shaking up the schedule a bit this week, but it’s a big week over here, so I hope that it’s worth the wait! I’ll be back to my regular schedule next Monday at noon ET like usual! For now, I have a few exciting announcements to share, and then a review and (what I think is) a cool creative, quarantine-friendly project in honour of the release of Miss Meteor, a new contemporary YA with speculative elements from incredible non-binary author Anna-Maria McLemore, in collaboration with Tehlor Kay Mejia.

Cemetery Boys Makes History

First, I want to take a quick minute to shout out trans author Aiden Thomas, his agent Jennifer March Soloway, and the editorial team at Swoon Reads, for the breakout success of the paranormal romance novel Cemetery Boys. Not only did it hit the NYT Bestsellers list, but it also made the National Book Award long list!

Thomas is in good company on the National Book Award long list – Black non-binary author Kacen Callender also made the list with their newest offering, King and the Dragonflies.

New Non-Binary Author: The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass

In my corner of the world, we’re also celebrating the debut YA from #SpineSquad author Adan Jerreat-Poole, The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass. Adan is a non-binary author, and their YA fantasy officially released this week from Dundurn, after quietly sneaking onto some shelves in advance earlier this summer. This is the first in a duology, and Adan’s working on some amazing new LGBTQ2S+ SFF projects for the future – so watch this space.

reddietoread

I couldn’t be more thrilled to introduce all of you to a new non-binary content creator who is now supported by Books Beyond Binaries: reddietoread! The human behind this account is Eddie, a college student studying literature, creative writing, and art history. They are currently fulfilling their middle school dream of being a booktuber, and they are working on their other childhood dream of becoming a published author. In their spare time they can be found reading YA and middle grade fiction, learning how to use power tools, and obsessing over anything dark academia-related.

Check out their channel for all kinds of rad content, including a playlist of non-binary book reviews and recommendations! The video below is the first in that series. Welcome to the team, Eddie! So glad to have you!!

Last But Not Least…

I just want to take this opportunity to wish an INCREDIBLE book birthday to my friend and author Cecilia Lyra on her sophomore novel, The Faithfuls, which comes out TODAY!!! CeCe is a badass Brazilian feminist woman living in Canada, and I was thrilled when my pre-order landed in my inbox this morning! Pick this one up, and when you do, if you can guess the twist ending? Make sure to let CeCe know… so far, no one has!

#MissMeteorOnTour

I jumped at the chance to be an official stop on the blog tour for this book (thanks, Caffeine!) for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is because the level of hype Miss Meteor is seeing leading up to its release is truly not on par with the level of excitement I felt when I discovered this title. Also – I want to interrupt myself for a second here to give a special shoutout to @MeteorReadathon on Twitter, because their Meteor Shower Readathon is such a great idea. If you haven’t had a chance to pick up some of these authors’ other works, check out their feed for great inspiration.

Tehlor Kay Mejia

I’ve gushed about Tehlor Kay Mejia’s incredible YA duology We Set the Dark on Fire and We Unleash the Merciless Storm in this space before. What I have never written about is how Anna-Marie McLemore’s Wild Beauty is one of the first books that brought me back to reading YA fiction after a long time away from the category. I picked it up when I first began working at Another Story, during my many years in academia, and had to reintroduce myself to YA after being exclusively immersed in scholarly non-fiction for way too long. Wild Beauty was one of the first queer YA books I ever read, and it is still one of few books that I see dimensions of myself reflected in that don’t really show up anywhere else. Later, when McLemore celebrated their non-binary identity publicly, it was super heartwarming for me, and their books hold a special place in my heart for all of that.

Anna-Marie McLemore

When I heard that these two incredible queer Latinx powerhouses were teaming up on a project, I was over the moon – and Miss Meteor does not disappoint. My preface to this glowing review is this: I didn’t bother to read much about the book before I picked it up, because I was so excited to see what Mejia and McLemore would come up with together. I had skimmed the jacket copy and seen the cover, and that was it. This book was not at all what I expected.

The best way I can think of to pitch Miss Meteor is if Dumplin’ were super queer, and had a little touch of magic. I was a kid who grew up closeted in a small town that’s truly supportive and sweet as long as you abide by don’t ask, don’t tell… and there there were a lot of moments of searing truth in this story. There aren’t enough queer books that take place outside of the sprawl of metropolis, and we need them. I don’t think that LGBTQ2S+ folks think enough about how different it is experiencing queerness and gender non-conformity outside of urban centres. McLemore and Mejia paint a picture of a small town that’s believable and quaint and chilling, and there is skillful, diverse representation in every direction in this narrative.

Miss Meteor has so many things to love, including food descriptions that left me drooling onto my eReader. It has Wild Beauty‘s fingerprints all over it in the character of Lita – after reading this, I want to go to a cactus birthday party so badly! The only criticism that I really have of the book overall is that I could have used just a touch more of the magic that we get a hint of through this main character. It had everything else – the thrust of a powerful friendship story to keep to keep the plot momentum in forward motion, touches of romance and truthfulness, and the spectacular, voicey writing that I’ve come to expect from the authors’ other works. I just fell a little bit in love with the girl who was made of stardust, and I wanted to know more.

Miss Meteor Stitch Project

For those of you who don’t know, when I’m not reading, I’m usually stitching. I discovered embroidery a few years ago when I was adjusting to a new psychiatric medication, and I still love it. It’s cheap, it’s not super difficult, and I love the outcome. For my creative project for #MissMeteorOnTour, I decided to make a sheet of stitchable (or colour-able, if you’re not a stitcher!) Miss Meteor Merit Badges!

What’s your favourite part of this book? The pageant, the cactus birthday parties, the delicious diner food, or the awesome space rocks and star dust? The choice is yours.

Project materials:

  • large wooden or plastic embroidery hoop – nothing fancy required
  • scissors
  • fabric! You can use an old T-shirt (or bedazzle a new one), a swatch of cotton, or really anything you have lying around. Choose something with a fun pattern for a decorative background.
  • medium-sized embroidery needles. I would suggest DMC Size 5, if you’re a beginner!
  • graphite transfer paper to trace the pattern onto the fabric
  • embroidery floss. Use any colours you want! I would suggest DMC six-strand embroidery floss. It’s inexpensive, you can get it at lots of craft stores, and it comes in LOTS of colours. Sometimes, less expensive floss can tangle more easily, but you can also dig into your childhood friendship bracelet supplies for this project!
  • basic felt sheets
  • Mod Podge matte – you can use the spray version, or use a sponge to apply the regular version

Resources used to create the merit badges:

Instructions

All you need to do is print the pattern above, use the graphite paper to trace it onto fabric (be careful, these lines won’t wash off), and then get started! Before you thread your needle, you’ll want to cut off a few feet of embroidery thread, and separate it into 3 strands. Only use 3 strands at a time to thread your needle. Once you’ve threaded your needle, and tied it off at the end, you’re ready to get stitching. You can use a simple straight stitch or back stitch for any of these designs, or get creative and choose something more complicated! There are loads of Youtube tutorials for learning embroidery stitches.

Once you’re done, and you love your badge, you can iron it flat, or leave it under a stack of books for a few days to flatten out. Then, cut the felt sheet to make a backing, and glue it to the back of the badge, and you’re done! If any of you decide to stitch (or colour!) a Miss Meteor merit badge from these patterns – PLEASE send me a note through the contact form! I would love to feature it on the site.

Happy stitching!

BREAK OUT THE SCISSORS

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Happy Monday, theydies and gentlethems. This week, I’m pleased to share with you a review of Avalon’s Last Knight, an #OwnVoices LGBTQ2S+ novel by trans author Jackson C. Garton. I’m also thrilled to host a guest post from dark fantasy author A. J. Vrana on one of my favourite editorial topics: HOW TO CUT WORDS. Thank you so much for your continued support of this space! If you want to throw a coin to your blogger, my ko-fi is linked at the end of the post.

Review: Avalon’s Last Knight, by Jackson C. Garton

I’m so pleased that author Jackson C. Garton sought me out and shared this book with me, and I owe him a public apology, because it took me forever to finally pick this up. 2020 has been a hard year, and if I had known that I would enjoy this as much as I did, I may not have waited so long. Sorry, fam!

Avalon’s Last Knight from Pride Publishing is loosely categorized as LGBTQ Urban Fantasy, but I think it is more accurately described as an LGBTQ2S+ romance with speculative elements. I’m not usually all about retellings, but Garton managed to skillfully integrate the old and the new in a way that wasn’t distracting from the thrust of the narrative. Set in the rural American south – a rare bird for LGBTQ2S+ fiction – Garton’s book follows Lance and Arthur, high school BFFs turned sweethearts, as they learn to navigate their new relationship, and all the complications that come with it.

With strikingly raw prose reminiscent of the fiction of the Trans Vanguard, Garton expertly weaves thematic aspects of the original tales of Avalon through a diverse and contemporary romance flavoured with a taste of the occult. Emotions right on the surface, this book tackles the complexity of transition, love, and the cultural tension of progressive life in a conservative setting.

My only criticism of this book is that, to my knowledge, the racial representation is not based on lived experience. For me as a reader, it felt as though the diversity aspects were handled sensitively, and this remains a book that I would recommend. As a white reader, I would be interested to see reviews of this title from POC.

When I asked Garton what book he would recommend by a Black author, he suggested Kacen Callendar’s Felix Ever After, which was featured on Santana Reads! I’m thrilled to have been introduced to Avalon’s Last Knight, and I look forward to seeing what Garton comes up with next.

The Baldwin quote above is the banner that I use on my editorial reports for my lit agent clients. It feels appropriate here, because today, I am completely stoked to be hosting one of those clients with a guest post on one of my FAVOURITE editorial topics: how to make deep cuts. There is nothing more satisfying than a manuscript with good economy of language, and no one knows how to achieve that better than A. J. Vrana. Her method is just… *chef’s kiss*. I asked her to write this as much for my nerdy brain as for anyone else’s benefit. I hope you’ll all enjoy as much as I did.

In the meantime, if I haven’t shouted about it enough, A. J. Vrana’s beautiful debut dark fantasy novel is also now available for purchase, if you’d like a book-length example of the kind of results you can get with her editorial methods.

How to Cut Words: Guest Post by A. J. Vrana

There is no shortage of jokes about writers. Whether you are a hobbyist or a professional, you’re bound to encounter a quip or two about creative types and their stubborn dedication to their artistic vision. Creative people are sometimes incorrectly stereotyped as being spacey, unmoored, and impractical, much to my personal chagrin. Of course, if that were true, none of us would have succeeded in making a living with our creative work, least of all in a business that is primarily concerned with one thing: making money.

There is no separating creative writing from the publishing industry if, well, you want to be published. While there are many talented, visionary writers out there, navigating the business side of publishing can prove frustrating and alienating for many people. However, if we want our work read, we need to come to terms with the fact that publishing is a business, and businesses will always be concerned with how to maximize their profits. One of the ways they do this is by becoming intimately acquainted with the market. For a book to be publishable, it needs to have commercial potential. It doesn’t matter how breath-taking, eloquent, or poetic your writing is; if it isn’t something a publisher feels they can sell to a market they themselves have carved out through a long history of curated publication and advertisement, there is little hope the manuscript will be acquired by an agent or an editor.

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One of the often understated facets of marketability is word count. See, when I say, “markets that have been carved out through a history of curated publication,” I’m talking about genre conventions that have slowly but surely become cemented in readers’ understanding of literature, and subsequently inform their expectations. Word count is one of the many markers of how well a work fits within its intended genre. It has implications not only for a publisher’s production costs and returns, but for how the market will actually receive the work.

So, what is an acceptable word count for your next best seller? Well, it depends on the genre. Here are some general figures for popular genres; these can be easily found on the interwebs:

  • Mainstream Romance: 70,000–100,000 words
  • Subgenre Romance: 40,000–100,000 words
  • Science Fiction / Fantasy: 90,000–120,000
  • Historical Fiction: 80,000–100,000
  • Thrillers / Horror / Mysteries / Crime: 70,000–90,000 words
  • Young Adult: 50,000–80,000
  • Middle Grade: 25,000–40,000 words
Photo by Jude Beck on Unsplash

With the exception of kidlit and SFF, you’ll notice immediately that the upper end of the word count bracket for most genres is 100k. However, I would argue that if you’re a debut author, your SFF should also be around or under 100k. Once you go over this mark, the work becomes an increasingly difficult sell for both agents and publishers.

I myself am a verbose gal. When I wrote the first draft of my debut, a contemporary dark fantasy, it was 135,000 words! I justified this massive word count by convincing myself it was what I needed to tell the story, but I was a DIRTY LIAR. In truth, the long word count reflected several of my weaknesses as a writer: I sucked at pacing. My first 50 pages were way too slow in getting to the action. I overwrote emotions. I spent too much time on scenes that didn’t move the plot forward, and I did so under the guise of ‘character development’. I underestimated how few words I needed to get my point across. After several rounds of substantive edits and several more of line edits, I parred the beast down to 97,000 words. The final manuscript upon publication? 98,300 words. The best part? The major plot beats and structure hadn’t even changed.

But how the heck do you chop a novel’s worth of words out of your manuscript to appease your agent or editor’s pragmatic bones? Well, let me tell you. Here’s how to murder your beloved in three, excruciating steps.

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STEP ONE: Reverse Outline Your Book

The first step to chop-chop-chopping is to get rid of any large chunks of text that are unnecessary to the plot. But how do you know what’s unnecessary to the plot? That three-page meditation on the movement of celestial bodies and their implications for the fate of the family cat provide the reader with such a keen glimpse into your character’s psyche.

To figure out whether your reader will give a rat’s ass about the family cat’s natal chart, try a reverse outline. To do this, make a note of your book’s conclusion, then work your way backwards. What event prompted the ending? What then triggered the event that prompted the ending? Keep working your way backwards until you reach the beginning of your book. The catch? Don’t look at your manuscript when you do it. You, as the author, should be able to backtrack through your entire manuscript and communicate the book’s major inciting events without analyzing the text.

Once you’ve done this, take a look at your manuscript and make note of everything that falls outside of those core events, then ask yourself if those scenes are truly necessary. After reverse outlining your book, you should have a little more distance to judge whether these outliers are really needed. If you aren’t sure, cut and paste them in a separate document and see if the story still works without them. If the answer is ‘yes,’ DELETE DELETE DELETE. I don’t care how much you like it; GET RID OF IT. You won’t notice it after it’s gone, I promise.

One other option is to consolidate chapters that deal with similar events or circumstances. Are there two chapters where your protagonist visits a creepy old man in the woods to get information about a certain mystery? Slap ’em together, delete all the dialogue and prose that isn’t vital for your reader, and maintain the core purpose of both chapters—but in one!

Photo by Alex Gruber on Unsplash

STEP TWO: Economy of Words

This is the more detail-oriented and pain-staking method of cutting words, but people grossly underestimate just how much can be excised with careful line edits. The goal here is to make sure that not a single word is wasted. There is no one method of doing this, but I’ve learned a few tricks that can go a long way.

Contractions. This one took me a while to get used to because I got my start in academic writing, where contractions are a big no-no. However, using contractions in non-academic writing, especially creative writing, can reduce word count significantly. Use Ctrl+F to find common phrases that can be replaced with contractions.

That. Many a time, the word ‘that’ is not really necessary. I was told that I’d have to cut at least 10,000 words from my book. See what I did there?

Sentence Structure. Sometimes, switching up syntax and playing with verb conjugation can spare a word or two per sentence. It may not seem like a lot, but when you have thousands of sentences, it adds up.

For example: He stared at the maskless buffoon and then wondered if humanity was done for.

Alternative: He stared at the maskless buffoon, then wondered if humanity was done for.

Even better alternative: He stared at the maskless buffoon, wondering if humanity was done for.

Now, you don’t want to use the same sentence structure over and over again. Don’t get too nitpicky with this, because sentence variety is more important than cutting a single word per sentence. Don’t forget that you can also change what order your clauses are in. Be conscious of modifiers and subordinate clause placement, as sometimes these can needlessly lengthen sentences.

Example from this very verbose blog: When I wrote the first draft of my debut, a contemporary dark fantasy, it was 135,000 words!

Alternative: The first draft of my contemporary dark fantasy debut was 135,000 words.

Photo by Wajih Ghali on Unsplash

Starting sentences with ‘And’ or ‘But’. This is probably the thing I struggled with most. I loooove starting sentences with ‘and’ and ‘but,’ especially when establishing a character’s voice. Sadly, it’s not necessary most of the time. Occasionally it’s fine if used for emphasis or in dialogue, but try to minimize this as much as possible.

Adjectives and adverbs. Remember when I said I overwrite emotions? Yeah, this. Listen, there is NOTHING wrong with a good adjective or adverb, but when you find yourself piling them on like a grocery list comprised entirely of snack foods, reign yourself in. Pick ONE snack food. Even better—ask yourself if there is a more accurate noun or verb that can replace the adjective + noun or adverb + verb you’re using.

Don’t repeat yourself. Sometimes when we try to communicate something, we spend too many sentences expressing the same sentiment. This is natural, as overwriting is how we explore the best way to get a point across. However, once we’ve done this, it’s a good idea to go back and pick one sentence that best communicates the intended point.

Metaphors > Literal Description. This can be a tough one as it forces you to exercise your poetic brain, but I promise it pays off and makes your writing more interesting. Literal descriptions of settings or a character’s emotional state tend to be quite lengthy, and if you have the attention span of a kitten like I do, they can be kind of boring too. Sometimes, an apt, pithy metaphor can convey all that needs to be conveyed in far fewer words than a very literal description. Don’t be afraid to experiment with similes and metaphors; if it doesn’t work, someone will let you know with their confusion! As with the suggestion about sentence structure, you shouldn’t turn every description into a metaphor, but it can help add some variety!

Example: On the weekends, the sidewalks were crowded with people pushing past one another.

Metaphor: On the weekends, the sidewalks [crowded] like an ant colony.

Photo by Dani Rendina on Unsplash

Don’t start sentences with ‘There was’.  This is best illustrated with an example.

Example: There was a child napping in the shade.

Alternative: A child napped in the shade.

Eliminate the obvious. This is another trick best illustrated with an example:

Example: The sky was grey. The clouds hung low, heavy with unfallen rain.

Alternative: The grey clouds hung low, heavy with unfallen rain.

Since clouds are inherently in the sky, we don’t have to mention the sky and the clouds.

Eliminate absences. One trick to using precise language is to eliminate any mention of things being absent, and instead focusing on what is present instead of the absence. Here’s what I mean:

Example: She stared at her estranged mother and felt nothing. The love was gone.

Alternative: She stared at her estranged mother. The love was gone.

Here, it’s redundant for us to say that someone felt nothing; instead, we can infer that there is an absence by noting that ‘the love was gone’.

Photo by Dani Rendina on Unsplash

STEP THREE: Repeat Step 2.

Seriously. You need to do the line edits like three times, because as you progress through your manuscript, you will grow lazy and let things slip. The first time I finished cutting on a line level, I’d eliminated 3000 words. After my second round, I’d eliminated 6000 words. By my third round, I’d cut a total of 8000 words.

And it was great.

Alex’s recommendation for a book by a Black author to check out is the Binti trilogy, by Nnedi Okorafor. I had the pleasure of hearing Okorafor speak in Denver a couple of years back, and she blew my mind. This book is definitely worth the read!

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

All Eyes on Her

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I could not be more excited for today’s post. I am super thrilled to welcome back BBB contributor Jack for another incredible review. This time, Jack writes about a forthcoming LGBTQ2S+ novel, Seven, by Farzana Doctor, an author of colour in my local, Toronto. Then, I am deeply honoured to be hosting a post by another Ontario author, Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, whose new YA thriller, All Eyes On Her, comes out later this month. She addresses a super challenging topic in writing, and one that she proves herself to be a master of in her upcoming title that I couldn’t put down: multiple POV.

Before we jump in, I just want to put in a quick plug for an upcoming LGBTQ2S+ contemporary indie press book by my client, author CM Harris. Maiden Leap releases on September 1st, and you can read more about it here!

In addition, as a follow up to last week’s post on chapter books, huge congratulations to Theanne Griffith, Reggie Brown, and their whole team – there are more Magnificent Makers books on the way!

Jack’s Review of Seven, by Farzana Doctor

I have such a fondness for Farzana’s work, which I discovered years ago through our mutual connection to the social work profession. I was super glad when Jack chose this book to check out. Seven comes out later this year, and is available for pre-order now.

Farzana Doctor’s novel Seven is the kind of novel that, like the scent of baked bread wafting over from a bakery, lures you in. In her fourth novel, Seven, Doctor explores themes of personhood, motherhood, and the concept of individuality in a collective community. The novel borrows from Farzana’s Indian ancestry, specifically her Dawoodi Bohra community and carefully braids truth and fiction into a family’s intergenerational story. What begins as an insight into a familial tree takes Sharifa through past and present becoming a story of chosen family and the fortitude of relationships.

Seven, is a layered concoction which reveals itself to its reader in pieces. In the novel, Doctor questions how people define “harm”, challenging the notion of harm and family as mutually exclusive. Doctor represents social justice on the public scale we are familiar with, and through the individual experience which personalizes pain.

Photo by Jill Dimond on Unsplash

CW for this book include sexual violence and gas-lighting. I found enlightenment in the presence of both sexual violence and strategies of healing. I recommend this book to readers in their young adulthood. It is also an insight into the different types of activism and stands one can take.

Farzana Doctor is a Canadian author, activist, and psychotherapist. She is a careful writer whose embroidery of Intergenerational trauma, the politicization of women’s bodies and the human experience, is both brilliant and alluring. What happens when trauma is weaponized as a vehicle of obedience and victims become perpetrators? How can multiple truths co-exist?

During this year’s Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), I had the pleasure of attending the virtual What We found discussion, where she posed thoughtful questions about identity, about writing. The thoughtfulness is evident once again in the configuration of Seven, a novel full of questioning.

The novel begins with Sharifa, a woman who feels broken. Sharifa and her family decide to go to India, where Murtuza (her husband) will be working and Sharifa will be on sabbatical. Sharifa plans on researching her family, specifically Abdoolally’s role as the family’s patriarch, while homeschooling her daughter.  Her daughter, Zee becomes a focal point, reminding Sharifa of herself as a child when she would travel back to India. During her research, Sharifa begins to identify the ways in which people can inflict harm their loved ones. Even though this is a work of fiction, the character of Abdoolally was inspired by Hussonally Dholkawala, Doctor’s great-great grandfather, and the character are based on the very real Dawoodi Bohras’ community.

Photo by Yaopey Yong on Unsplash

In many ways, the novel is an account of the experiences of a cultural transplant with sexual violence, generational trauma and belonging. By showing the varying ways in which trauma shows up for the same experience, Doctor explores the complicated nature of trauma.

In Seven, the reader is given pieces of a puzzle and asked: “what happens if we believe in the wrong thing, the wrong people?” What does healing look like?

Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, Author of ALL EYES ON HER

I met Laurie through this blog, when I first wrote about one of her titles, Last Girl Lied To, which I read during the #VillainAThon last year. I could not put this book down. Since then, I’ve learned that Laurie herself is as much of a delight as her books are, as she’s peppered me with recommendations for other un-put-down-able titles over the last several months. I think that I can safely say that we share a passion for messy teenaged femme characters, and I have never been disappointed by a book that she’s suggested for me.

I am honoured to have met Laurie, and to have received an ARC of her forthcoming YA novel, All Eyes On Her to screen read for my bookshop. It was the first book I read in 2020, while I was going through a very difficult time in my life, and it was immersive and escapist and everything I’d hoped. The ending drove me bananas in the best possible way. The last chapter was absolutely delicious, and kept me guessing through the very last page. All Eyes On Her comes out on August 18th, and is available for pre-order now.

More recently, Laurie has achieved incredible success, and as a reader I could not be happier, and as one of her supporters, I am deeply proud. Her adult debut was recently acquired by Simon and Schuster, and optioned for television by AMC. I can’t wait to read this book, and I hope desperately that we’ll all get to watch it come to live as a super bingeable series.

For this post, I am so grateful that Laurie addressed multi-POV writing. As I wrote at the top of this post, she executes it perfectly in All Eyes On Her, and it’s something that takes so much technique, precision, and dedication to master. Thank you so much for this, Laurie, and congratulations for all that is to come!

As is tradition, I asked Laurie to recommend some books by Black authors that readers of this blog should check out alongside All Eyes On Her. Her choices were Some Other Now by Sarah Everett, which releases in early 2021. She also loved Allegedly, by Tiffany D. Jackson, and You Don’t Know Me But I Know You by Rebecca Barrow. 

Voices in a Crowd: Writing Multiple POV

When I started writing All Eyes On Her, I didn’t have a plot or an outline—just a vaguely drawn idea about a boy and a girl who went into the woods, and only the girl came back. The first voice that came to me was the main character Tabitha’s best friend, Elle, and the next thing I knew, Tabby’s sworn enemy needed a say too. Before I knew it, several other characters had emerged from my imagination, all of them with one thing in common: They knew, or had known, Tabitha Cousins, and thus felt qualified to weigh in on her guilt or innocence. To act as a sort of jury, convincing the reader of her true nature.

I drafted the novel in a fast and furious blur. By the time I finished, there were five main point of view characters, each with a different relationship to Tabby and her deceased boyfriend Mark, as well as several peripheral characters with their own chapters. To complicate matters, the story also involved news articles, blog posts, texts, diary entries, and police transcripts. 

I give huge credit to my editors for not balking at the idea of a novel with so many different POV characters and formats. They were fully on board and excited about the concept from the start. I knew the challenges I was facing—to successfully execute the style I wanted the novel to take, each voice had to sound unique, and each character had to provide different information that informed the narrative and moved the plot along. It was in editing and revising that I really learned what worked and what didn’t, and I came up with these tips for anyone else working on (or wanting to start) a multiple POV novel!

Photo by Nguyen Thu Hoai on Unsplash

Know Your Characters

You need to know your characters no matter how many POV characters you have, or how the story is told. But it’s especially important when you have a cast of characters whose voices each need to sound distinct. Each time I entered a new perspective, I settled into that character’s head, and that informed the voice. I often asked myself, is this something she would say? Is this a reaction she would have? I also challenged myself to memorize each person’s motivations—why he feels this way, and why he thinks the reader needs to be made aware. I aimed to know instinctively how each character would react to a situation, even if it was a situation that wasn’t happening on the page. 

The Why

Ask yourself why a certain character’s POV needs to be included. What does it bring to the story? What information or insight does this person provide that another one can’t? A few side characters with POV chapters in the first draft of All Eyes On Her were cut in revisions, because as fun as they were to write, they weren’t adding any new or crucial information to the narrative.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Try Different Formats

While most of my POV characters have first-person present-tense chapters, I wrote one entirely using a police transcript format. At the time, I wasn’t sure why his story needed to be told this way, but looking back, I can see the reason. I didn’t necessarily want the reader in his head as much as directly outside of it. I wanted to showcase his personality through dialogue and intentionally keep certain thoughts off-limits. Which brings me to the next point…

Hide and Seek

Just because you have multiple characters doesn’t mean you need to give readers their every thought. In fact, it’s more effective when you don’t (especially if you’re writing a thriller where everybody may be a suspect…). Think as much about what you choose not to share as what you do. Give your readers tantalizing little gaps to fill in. Consider why a character may not be saying something, and what that tells readers about him or her. The only thing I love more than an unreliable narrator… unreliable narrators.

The only thing I love more than an unreliable narrator… unreliable narrators.

Show, Don’t Tell

This is solid advice for writing in general, but I find it especially helpful for navigating a multi-POV book. If readers are simply told every thought in a character’s mind, they’ll get bored easily, and you run the risk of one character blending into the next. Show how the character interacts with others. How she walks and talks. What her hobbies are. How she acts at parties. How she behaves around friends versus parents. What her secrets are, and how she conceals them…

Streamline Information

Something to avoid with a large cast of POV characters is each section feeling like an info-dump, or a repetition of information another character already shared. Ideally, you want each character’s next chapter to piggyback off the one before it, ramping up to the climax of the novel. The order needs to be determined by underlying tension, and what comes next to ratchet up that tension. Every author has a different strategy, and there’s no wrong way. Some write all of one character’s chapters before moving into the head of another, and some write mostly in chronological order. For this book, I head-hopped and wrote mostly in order, which I think helped with the pacing, and ensured that every new event built on the one before it to create momentum.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Motivation is Key

Since character arcs are so important, this is a challenge when you have several characters whose stories need to feel compelling on their own, as well as part of a whole. Make sure you always know what each character wants, and what’s standing in the way of them getting it. I also like to keep in mind what each character is hiding, or what they don’t want people to find out. Having character arcs overlap and inform each other is like putting together a (sometimes frustrating, sometimes extremely satisfying) puzzle.

Differentiate Speech and Mannerisms

A trick I employed as I edited All Eyes On Her: If I picked up the manuscript and flipped to a random chapter, would I know whose head I was in within a couple sentences? If the answer was no, I looked at why. Had I fallen into similar phrasing? Made everyone constantly push their hair back behind their ears? Did the dialogue feel familiar? Voice is everything in a book with several of them, so having consistent go-to mannerisms or expressions that feel familiar to a character helps them stand out.

I hope these tips are helpful to anyone writing multiple POV! All in all, try to think of it for what it is… a very fun experience, and a challenge that will improve your writing. If you’re someone who gets bored easily (hi, me) or something doesn’t feel right in your book from just one POV, it might be worth figuring out whose voice to potentially add to the story. Listen to what that character has to say—because it may be quite telling.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

Veronica Mars, But Make It Queer

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After taking the longest hiatus from posting that I have taken since I started this blog, coming back feels a little bit like coming home. I love my life as a literary agent, and in these quarantimes I am missing my life as a bookseller, but first and foremost, I’m always a bookworm at heart. I decided to take a step back from posting to make space for Black and BIPOC voices making essential statements during a very difficult political time both for publishing and for all of us who are touched and affected by COVID-19. I don’t want anyone to stop listening to those voices, but I also don’t want to stop making space for LGBTQ2S+ voices in this little space of mine. With that in mind, I would like to extend an ongoing invitation to Black and BIPOC writers who would find it advantageous – reach out to me. This space is yours to use if it’s useful to you. I would always be more than willing to use this platform to host and boost your words and voices if I can.

With that in mind, I have two books that I have personal connections to that I want to mention this week, and I am also all kinds of honoured to be hosting Kylie Schachte, author of You’re Next this week. But first, I want to plug a few of my favourite books by Black authors, for those of you who may not know them yet.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you will know that two of my favourite books of all time are Freshwater, by Akewaeke Emezi, and Hurricane Child, by Kacen Callender – both non-binary authors. Freshwater is an adult literary novel that is like no other book I’ve read before. It’s powerful and otherworldly, at times baffling and at others too relatable. It delves into themes like identity, sexuality, and trauma, and it is a difficult but breathtaking book. Hurricane Child, on the other hand, is an accessible middle grade ghost story about a young, Black, queer girl navigating her first crush. It’s poetic and spooky in all the best ways, and I would recommend it to readers of any age. While I’m at it, I’m going to put in a quick plug for books by a dear friend – Emmy Jackson is a Black author of post-apoc fiction, and their book is literally next on my TBR. We’re working on a top secret project together right now, and they’re one of my favourite people. Check out their books here.

If you’re seeking something more contemporary, I would recommend Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid, which deserves to be the next TV series à la Little Fires Everywhere. I feel like every millennial has known the characters in this book in their own lives, for better or worse, and the ending is deeply satisfying. Helen Oyeyemi is an author who never ceases to amaze me. Gingerbread is my favourite novel of hers, and it’s a twisting, winding, family epic turned fairytale that is all about a sticky, spicy, maybe deadly (??) snack. In non-fiction, I’d check out Haben Girma’s memoir – a book that I don’t think got enough buzz early on, and comes out in paperback later this summer. Haben tells her story of being a deafblind Black woman, and I think it’s essential reading – especially for anyone who can only name one deafblind person in history (Helen Keller).

As for books by Black authors that I have on my TBR that are coming out later this year, there are so many… Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko, is a YA fantasy about having the strength to find your own path. I love innovative true crime memoir, and Natasha Trethewey’s book Memorial Drive that examines the murder of her mother looks fantastic. I’m SO HYPED for Alyssa Cole’s new thriller, When No One is Watching – look out for a review somewhere in the near future, because I snagged an ARC! And in my FAVOURITE genre, YA thriller, Tiffany Jackson will drop Grown later in 2020.

…I’ll stop there for now, but thanks to inspiration from Kylie, I’ve asked everyone who I’m featuring in the blog today to recommend a book by a Black author, so this post is packed with suggestions from some incredible authors in their own right.

New Books to Check Out

While the blog was on hiatus, my agenting partner in crime celebrated her book birthday, for her debut novel The Sunset Sisters! Congratulations, CeCe! I couldn’t be prouder of you. This book is the perfect summer read, and is a great commercial fiction recommendation written by a badass feminist author. Cecilia is a Brazilian woman living in Canada, and I am absolutely honoured to call her my friend.

I asked Cecilia what book by a Black author she’d like to recommend alongside The Sunset Sisters, and she chose her favourite of this year so far – The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett.

Next, I want to give a quick shoutout to A. J. Vrana, one of my #SpineSquad authors, who is celebrating HER book birthday for her debut novel on July 28th. This dark fantasy is based on her South Slavic heritage, and it gave me nightmares. I’ll cop to it! The book that she wants to recommend alongside The Hollow Gods is How Long ’til Black Future Month, by N. K. Jemisin.

We also celebrated the sale of her audio rights to Tantor this past week, so there will be an awesome audiobook forthcoming! Congrats!!

You’re Next, by Kylie Schachte

When I picked up You’re Next earlier this year, I was absolutely gobsmacked. I read it because I had an ARC, and it was an easy go-to… as you all know, murder is my comfort read. What I actually got was a super queer, relatable, emotional story that blew me away. It reminded me of Veronica Mars, but super queer. Book of my HEART. I immediately reached out to Kylie, who is an absolute fucking gem, to tell her what a punchy rollercoaster her book had been for me. I’m thrilled that Kylie was up for writing a post for this space, and even more excited because what she wrote feels like it was pulled straight out of my heart. Thank you so much, Kylie, it’s an honour.

The cover of You’re Next, out July 7th.

You can pre-order You’re Next now, and while you’re at it, Kyle recommended two books by Black authors who share her book birthday: Cinderella is Dead, by Kalynn Bayron, and The Voting Booth, by Brandy Colbert. Here’s your summer challenge from me: order all three. You won’t regret a thing.

Re-Imagining Escapism for a World on Fire: Kyle Schachte

Emmy and I first planned the topic for this post back in March, but I am writing it in June. A month defined by uprisings in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Riah Milton, Dominique Fells, and more–more lives, more Black people brutally killed, so many that even as I say those names there are many more I’m leaving out. More may be murdered between the moment I write this sentence and the day it is posted. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the pandemic disproportionally kills Black and brown people, for deliberate, systemic reasons. 

This post is not about how I, as a white woman, feel about those murders, or the general state of racial injustice–the world emphatically does not need that. But to not mention this context would be to entirely miss the point of what I’m about to say. 

My book, YOU’RE NEXT, is the story of Flora Calhoun–a sixteen-year-old girl obsessed with solving the murder of her ex-girlfriend, Ava McQueen. I first started writing the book because I wanted to write something “fun.” I had this idea about a girl detective–a girl who would toss off one-liners like a hardboiled PI from the 40s…right before she went to math class. It would be campy, and sarcastic, and full of things like fight scenes and explosions. People might bring it to the beach, or stay up all night finishing it. 

Photo by Nicolas Ladino Silva on Unsplash

But from the moment I began writing, I ran into some difficult questions. At the core of any murder mystery is, well, murder. So how do I write a “fun” book, when at the heart of it is a queer Black girl, brutally killed? And any murder mystery must grapple, in some kind of way, with justice–what it means and how it should be served. So how do I write a “fun” book about that, when our own justice system is so broken?

There are phenomenal YA books that tackle topics like these head-on, such as The Hate U Give, or the forthcoming This is My America. These are gorgeous, wrenching books that are desperately needed in YA. But this conversation should not be limited to “issue” books, and it shouldn’t solely be the responsibility of Black and POC creators. Too often, the media we think of as being “commercial” or “fun” (specifically the stuff made by white people) side steps these questions altogether. Those stories take place in some kind of parallel universe, where race, class, gender and the like simply do not exist. 

There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of them is that same question I was asking myself: how do you write something that’s both fun and acknowledges the sad, infuriating realities of the world? Doesn’t that, kind of by definition, make things less fun? 

Well…yeah, in some ways. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that teenagers getting killed is fun. But we should also ask: fun for whom? That fictional parallel reality, absent any acknowledgement of inequality…it was constructed for the comfort of white people. An excuse for us to continue to ignore what we are already ignoring in the real world. Escapism from the issues that barely touch us, and yet make us uncomfortable. A world in which our privilege goes unacknowledged and unchecked. 

When creators respond to these critiques, the answer is often, “It’s not supposed to be that serious,” or, “I don’t want people to have to think that hard.” Mind you, these are often the same people who have developed wholeass magic systems they expect readers to follow, but acknowledging that race…exists…is asking people to think too hard. And that response actually makes a lot of assumptions about readers, and what they will find enjoyable. It assumes a definition of “pleasure” that is, like so many things, oriented around a straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied, male gaze. 

Photo by James Eades on Unsplash

But that kind of pleasure can ruin a story for others. I often give up on shows or books because the oversights are so glaring. Is this a world in which no people of color exist? No queer people? Women do not make up 50% of the population? When I consume those kinds of stories, there is no escape. My brain works double time to pick out every issue, every whitewashing, every dogwhistle. 

And anyway, it’s a false choice! We already know for a fact that it is possible to write books that can be both fun and acknowledge systemic injustice…because marginalized writers have been creating those stories for ages. Check out A Blade So Black by L.L. McKinney, You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson, or the upcoming Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas–all joyful and escapist, and yet imbued with the lived experience of marginalization. And we should absolutely be handing the mic to #OwnVoices authors at every opportunity, but that does not absolve us from needing to do better in our own work as well. 

I’ve been thinking about these questions since I started writing YOU’RE NEXT in 2014, but my thoughts started to coalesce a few months ago, when I watched the movie Knives Out. For those who haven’t seen it, the movie is an extremely campy, whimsical romp in the vein of Clue, or The Westing Game. An eccentric millionaire is murdered in a locked room, and a brilliant, ostentatious private investigator is brought in to figure out whodunit. But underneath those fun trappings, the movie is also a pointed rebuke of white privilege. The millionaire in question left his entire fortune to his nurse, Marta–a young Latinx woman whose mother is undocumented–cutting his family out of the will altogether. At first, the white family members treat Marta with saccharine affection (while loudly debating in her presence whether “illegals” should be deported), but when the money gets involved, they turn on her. They threaten her and weaponize her mother’s immigration status–even the “nice,” “liberal” side of the family. 

Now, is Knives Out a nuanced, in-depth portrayal of our broken immigration system, or the ways white people benefit from systemic racism? No. It is zany and bonkers, and exactly what you would want from a movie like that. But it provides just enough context to feel like it lives in our real world, or at least was created by people who are aware not only that these problems exist, but that they shape every story we tell–whether we acknowledge them or not. 

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

“Escapism” shouldn’t mean ignoring hard or painful things completely. Instead, when we acknowledge those issues, we find new narrative possibilities–we can create “escapist” fiction that is in dialogue with the things we are trying to escape. Knives Out is pleasurable–and commercially successful!–not because it pretends that racism and xenophobia don’t exist, but because Marta triumphs over it through her own cleverness and good heart. 

The joy I tried to create in YOU’RE NEXT is a little different. Yes, there’s the fun, high octane stuff–car chases, fight clubs, Noir tropes with a high school twist. But unlike Knives Out, the triumph over injustice at the end isn’t so clean & tidy. In many ways, I think the true pleasure of the book comes not from joy, but from pure, unadulterated rage. 

It is fury that propels Flora, the main character, to act. Anger that fuels her obsession with solving Ava’s murder. She lives in the same world we do, where kids are killed all the time, and the entire system is built to protect the wealthy & privileged. And she’s pissed as hell about it. She would love nothing more than to scream “fuck you” in the face of everyone who doesn’t care, or who looks away…and she kind of does exactly that. 

And the satisfaction of that rage can be its own kind of pleasure, or escape. As I have better educated myself about the injustice of the world around me, I have often been sad…but more often I have been livid. Furious with the world for being such a dark and violent place, furious with other people for not doing anything about it, and furious with myself for not knowing better sooner. And while there is plenty we can do in real life to work towards a better world, my hope is that there is something deeply, primally satisfying about watching a teenage girl–someone whom society has deemed weak, vulnerable, without agency–burn the whole fucking thing to the ground. 

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I strove to write a book that is “fun,” but still inhabits a world in which race, class, and injustice actually exist. As an obscenely privileged white woman, I have certainly gotten things wrong, and have much work still to do. But I could not write a book in which a queer, Black teenage girl dies and pretend that her race and sexuality have nothing to do with her death, or the failures of the investigation. I could not write a book in which teenagers participate in an illegal fight club for money, and not acknowledge the class divisions that drove them to such violence. Acknowledging these problems is not a chore, or an obligation. It creates opportunities for newer, more original stories to be told–and, most importantly, to connect with more readers. Because we already have plenty of books that look the other way, and people are hungry for something else.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

…and we’re back!

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My dearly departed laptop.

It was bound to happen some time! Two weeks ago, my beloved Frankenstein of a laptop finally died, and I simply did not have it in me to fight to assemble a blog post. It’s the first time that I’ve missed a planned post since I started this blog, so I’m super happy to be back in action this week with a post that’s super exciting. I’m so pleased to host a review of forthcoming LGBTQ2S+ novel You Exist too Much, by BIPOC author Zaina Arafat, by BBB’s new regular contributor, Jack.

I’m also thrilled to be able to share a guest post from an author for whom I have deep admiration, Isabel Stirling. She is the creator of some FABULOUS queer witches in her YA novel These Witches Don’t Burn, and its upcoming sequel, This Coven Won’t Break! I feel especially attached to celebrating Isabel’s latest book because I celebrated my own birthday on May 3rd, and her book releases on May 19th, so we are Taurus twins! More on that later…

First! I want to share a quick shoutout to AJ Vrana. Her debut novel, The Hollow Gods, comes out with Parliment House Press on July 28th. I participated in the cover reveal for this novel on Twitter, and since then, AJ’s joined the list of authors who I represent as an agent. I’m super proud that The Hollow Gods was reviewed by Publisher’s Weekly this week!

Jack’s Review: You Exist too Much, by Zaina Arafat

Zaina Arafat is an American and Palestinian writer and journalist and teacher. Her debut novel You Exist too Much is a diasporic piece of fiction. The story is told in flashbacks, beginning with the shaming of a twelve-year-old Palestinian girl, whose feelings of not belonging are externalized. It’s a story told in cyclical flashbacks, similarly to how we live life. Geographically, the novel mainly alternates between the US and the Middle East, between New York and Palestine.

This novel explores the meaning of living on the margins, of wanting to fit in a neat category. As an American and Palestinian woman, who has loved both men and women, she exists in the overlapping centre of a Venn diagram. The protagonist exists too much, yet, struggles to occupy space for herself. Arafat explores the pervasiveness of intergenerational trauma, and how it affects one’s identity.

Content warnings in You Exist Too Much include Emotional manipulation and Eating Disorders. While at a retreat, topics including sexual assault (from the perspective of the perpetrator) and substance abuse are mentioned.

When the novel begins, we know that the protagonist is in pain. It is the kind of emotional pain that manifests physically, the pain that makes You Exist too much an accusatory statement. The protagonist attempts to heal by falling in love with others, eventually realizing that one person can’t simultaneously occupy two bodies. We follow the protagonist as she confronts the different ways in which she exists.

This is a novel about existing and occupying space, it’s a novel about visibility and acceptance. The protagonist is presented as out of sync with the world, her live-in girlfriend and her own self. The novel embraces missed connections and opportunity, depicting the fleetingness and intensity of desire. You Exist Too Much is a story about identities and the complexities of attachments. Arafat invites us to question what obsessions, attraction and attachments all have in common.

YA Fantasy

Before I jump into Isabel Sterling’s awesome and creative guest post, I want to talk a little bit about why the publication and popularity of These Witches Don’t Burn and This Coven Won’t Break are such huge accomplishments.

YA fantasy is a hard market in traditional publishing. Looking at the deals made so far in 2020, there have only been 10 acquisitions in children’s (including MG and YA) fantasy, across all imprints, this year. One of them is a Lucasfilm IP property, and one is the next in the Keeper of the Lost Cities series, so really, it’s more like 8 deals total for new books in that space, in the span of nearly 5 months. In 2019, there were 11 total deals in that space that were not series continuations. The competition is fire!! And yet, Isabel’s books are doing great.

Also, shoutout to writer KJ Aiello, who helped me out with this post, and asked: does crossover potential (ie, books that could appeal to YA or adult audiences) help fantasy books that are going on submission in traditional publishing? The unfortunate reality is, when a book is submitted to an imprint, you either sub to a YA imprint, or an adult imprint. The only real exceptions to that are SMG, which has St. Martin’s/Wednesday and acquires for both age groups, Tor, which encompasses Tor Teen, and Amazon, which publishes specifically with an eye to YA that is actually written for adult audiences.

BUT. When you see “crossover potential”, “millennial fiction”, “college-aged YA”, these kinds of terms, what they are actually code for, in the industry, is “New Adult”. Publishing’s unspoken secret is that we do publish NA, all the time. It’s just not branded as NA anymore, because the way that that experiment played out like, 5-10 years ago, is that the term has a negative connotation (ie, it just means YA books with erotic content now, basically), so we have to call it something different.

But adult appeal in YA-branded books is actually somewhat essential. A little over 50% of YA readership IS adults, and in addition, YA novels have to appeal to adults because they are often the ones with the purchasing power even if the books’ audiences are younger. Educational wholesale markets are a huge part of that – so not only are publishers aiming to appeal to adult readers of YA, but they’re also aiming to appeal to parents, teachers, and librarians. Fantasy novels aren’t seen to have as much of a place in a classroom setting as some other kinds of novels, partially because of the stigmas that surround all genre works as being seen as less-than compared to more “literary” work. Also, YA as we know it has only existed since the 1970s, so it’s by far the newest category in the traditional publishing industry, and it’s only been seen as legitimate since the late 1980’s, early 1990s.

If you want to learn more about YA books in general, YA fantasy, and on the attitudes toward genre versus literary works in broader publishing, here is some further reading:

  1. How Young Adult Fiction Blossomed With Teenage Culture in America
  2. A Brief History of YA Literature: An Infographic
  3. Home and Away, by Guy Gavriel Kay
  4. The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists, by Ursula K. Le Guin
  5. How Horror Helps Us Overcome Our Fears, by Adam Pottle

This Coven Won’t Break Tarot Reading, by Isabel Sterling

Hello, Readers! Isabel Sterling here. To celebrate the upcoming release of This Coven Won’t Break, emmy suggested a tarot reading for my three main girls, and I thought that sounded like a wonderful idea. I don’t normally let myself think about what happens to my characters after their book is done, so getting to read for Hannah, Morgan, and Gemma was really fun! The cards had some interesting things to say. 

For this reading, I used the Modern Spellcaster’s Tarot Deck. I really enjoy this deck, especially because all of the major love cards are same-gender couples, and there’s racial diversity in there, too. Definitely a step up from many super white, heteronormative traditional decks.

Since This Coven Won’t Break is her story, I started with Hannah.

(Pictured: Seven of Pentacles, Ten of Wands, and The Sun)

In This Coven Won’t Break, Hannah works a lot with the Council, the organization responsible for protecting the three Witch Clans and keeping everyone in line. Hannah plants a lot of seeds with them, so the Seven of Pentacles tells me she’s going to be working to help those efforts grow and bloom. Unfortunately, it looks like Hannah will try to bite off more than she can chew and work harder than she should (Ten of Wands). If she’s not careful, some important things could end up dropped. Luckily, she has Morgan and Gemma to remind her to actually get out and have some fun in the sun, and overall, she has a really awesome summer.

Hannah definitely deserves some rest, relaxation, and brightness in her life. So The Sun card was nice to see. It also looks like she has some babysitting in her future, and perhaps some unexpected twins from Sarah and Rachel? (Who knows! Not me! Like I said, if it didn’t happen in the book, I honestly don’t know.)

Next, let’s take a peek into Morgan’s summer.

(Pictured: Queen of Swords, Two of Cups, and Two of Wands)

Well, without getting into spoilers, Morgan kinda Goes Through It during the course of This Coven Won’t Break. As a result, the Queen of Swords is telling me her mom gets a little over-protective about things. Which, honestly, is reasonable. With the Two of Cups, though, it looks like Morgan still has plenty of time to hang out with Hannah. I see lots of dates at their secret spot in the woods. (And see what I mean about the same-gender couple! I love this deck.) 

With everything that happens to Morgan, the Two of Wands tells me she’s a little nervous about leaving the nest to go to college. She’s just finally putting down roots in Salem and isn’t sure she’s ready to move on and start her “real” life.

Finally, let’s take a look at Gemma’s reading.

(Pictured The Tower, The Empress, and the Ace of Cups)

Well, The Tower is a total spoiler, so I can’t really say much except Gemma’s world turns upside down a bit near the end of the book. The Empress, though, tells me Gem spends much of her summer further honing her interest in all things witchy–tarot cards and crystals and everything. The Empress is often linked to motherly instincts, but in Gemma’s case, I see that as her connection with Hannah’s boss, Lauren, and Gemma getting into with her feminine intuition. 

Finally, it looks like there might be some romance waiting for Gemma with that Ace of Cups. Her crushes in These Witches Don’t Burn didn’t turn out so great, so she definitely deserves a little post-graduation fun. Maybe she can double-date with Hannah and Morgan! 

That’s all the cards had in store for us tonight. I hope you found this fun, and if you haven’t yet, you can order These Witches Don’t Burn here and This Coven Won’t Break over here! Happy reading! 

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

Changing of the Seasons

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I am staggered these past few weeks about how much can change in, seemingly, the blink of an eye. The world feels so different now than it did mere weeks ago – and yet, since the day I started Books Beyond Binaries, I haven’t missed a scheduled post, so the band plays on.

The last couple of years have been very challenging for me, and in 2019, I began tweeting about celebrating small joys. I’m not a naturally optimistic person, and in times of difficulty, embracing things like Pokémon GO and homemade ice cream has helped more than I’d readily admit. These days, as most days, I’m taking a great deal of solace in books, so I’m grateful to have this space to share.

And share I shall! Today is extremely exciting for me, because I get to introduce you all to BBB’s first repeat contributor! I reached out on Twitter seeking collaborators for this blog, and I am deeply lucky that Jack reached back out to me, and will be contributing her ARC reviews to enrich the content of this space over the coming months!

An image of Jack, a Black queer woman, eyes closed, wearing gold jewellery, and covered in powder-like, colourful paint.

Jack is a queer writer and artist who is completing her English and Cultural studies B. A
at McMaster University. She likes to read psychological thrillers, Afrofuturistic works and
genre-bending memoirs that include Auto-Theory. Also, she enjoys watching films,
writing short stories, drawing and desserts that are sweet, but not too sweet. It is my absolute pleasure to give over my platform to this brilliant reader and writer, and welcome her reviews of forthcoming queer books!

There are two other firsts that I’ll be celebrating in this post, as well: the book birthday of Mia Siegert’s Somebody Told Me: the first traditionally-published novel to feature a bigender protagonist… AND IT’S A YA SUSPENSE NOVEL. I’m hyped!

Last, but not least – if you’ve been following me for a little while, you’ll know that I’m on the planning team for the Festival of Literary Diversity, held each year in Brampton, ON. It is my favourite lit festival on the planet. In light of current events, the FOLD will move online, for free, for the first time ever this year. There are 19 virtual events this year, and all you need to attend – from anywhere in the world – is to register on Eventbrite. There is one event that I’m going to highlight, though, that everyone who reads BBB should attend – both because it’s going to be AWESOME and also because it’s on my BIRTHDAY. The Art of Craft: Trans Brilliance Edition! Organized by the FOLD and Kai Cheng Thom partially in response to the transphobic violence perpetrated by the Toronto Public Library this year, this event features some mind-blowing trans writers and creators: Gwen Benaway, Ali Blythe, Casey Plett, and Jia Qing Wilson-Yang, as well as Kai herself.

Poster for The Art of Craft: Trans Brilliance Edition

Jack’s ARC Review: Broken People, by Sam Lansky

Sam Lansky’s Broken People, a work of fiction with autobiographical undertones, makes a clear distinction between a physical journey and a spiritual quest. His diction is hypnotizing, twisting and twirling until the tale he has woven is all you can think about devouring. The protagonist’s sense of awareness or lack of, drives the story. It’s a work of art that reminds us that, writing is not healing, rather, it is the reflection, the learning and understanding, that leads to healing. Similarly, the main character’s healing process begins when he faces himself in the process of what he has written.


Lansky writes a riveting tale of growing up, of finding your voice and the cyclical nature of healing. Today, we’ve cultivated the unrealistic expectation of achieving all our life goals age thirty, convinced that not meeting this constraint is an act of failure. The reader is implicated in a story of growth, one that comes from understanding one’s experience rather than just experiencing. It’s difficult to articulate what we feel and how that may have led us to act a certain way, but Lansky does it expertly. He creates characters who come to life by simply existing, making choices, breathing.


CW for this book include eating disorders, substance use and partner violence (verbal and emotional). I found myself at certain scenes conflicted, but it was in that space that I was able to acknowledge the nuances of interpersonal relationships. I recommend this book to readers in early adulthood, who are looking for something.

The cover of Broken People, by Sam Lansky, which features a hummingbird.


There are similarities between Sam Lansky the author, and Sam the main character. Broken People references the protagonist as a writer whose memoir explores substance use, which is like the content of Sam Lansky’s previous work The Gilded Razor: a memoir. Sam crafts a journey of love and forgiveness and situates it in a work of fiction.


We meet Sam, a man who seems stuck and the story is full of flashbacks. He is living the dream before the dream: moving in with a friend, dreaming about becoming a published author.


The more he can afford, the emptier Sam feels. We follow Sam through the vulnerability in the wake of sexual encounters, heartbreak and career successes. We become entrenched in what it means to explore one’s love language when loving yourself did not seem to be an option.


I am currently writing a paper where I explore the relationship between the physical body and orientation, of both gender and sexuality. Lansky writes of self-discovery through both the body and the external world. How do you explore the world when you do not feel at home in your own body? How can you escape who you are? He does not answer these questions, rather, he offers possible paths. Lansky explores consumption of relationships, food and substance use. “Your body is a temple”, but what if you don’t know how to praise whom the altar belongs to? What if you don’t know yourself? There is no single cure or quick fix to the struggles of real life, but there is learning, through trial and error. So that is my take-away. Reading Broken People felt like making a home out of a story. It’s a story about the coming of age of the coming of age story.

Broken People is scheduled to be released in June 2020, and is available for pre-order now.

Happy Book Birthday to Somebody Told Me, by Mia Siegert

Yall, it is a weird time to be celebrating a book birthday, but we are here, and it is happening, and I have been waiting for this little gem for a while!

Somebody Told Me is the first novel to be traditionally published featuring bigender representation, and it came out this month from Carolrhoda and is available to buy now. Mia’s described this book as the French film Améie, but if it went terribly wrong… and given that Amélie is a huge favourite of mine, I am so here for this.

The novel follows Russian Jewish protagonist Aleks/Alexis as they navigate gender, and the fallout after they are sexually assaulted in their fandom community. It explores themes of gender presentation as the MC tries to solve a mystery before someone else gets hurt, and in doing so, confront their abuser and their own trauma. It’s not a light and fluffy read, and CWs also include trans and queerphobia, and religious content. That said, this is the kind of nuanced diversity representation that as a reader, I’ve been waiting for, and I would say: don’t sleep on this.

For a taste of what you can expect from this book, check out the book trailer above, voiced by Katelyn Clarke and Zeno Robinson. And while you’re at it, head on over to Mia’s Twitter, where you can check out the this spectacular book look featuring colourways from the bi-coded book cover, and wish a happy book birthday to Somebody Told Me!

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!