June 30, 2019

Happy Pride! I haven’t had as much time to read lately, and I haven’t liked many of the queer books I’ve been reading enough to recommend them, but I did find one last book to fit in under the wire: Release by Patrick Ness. This one’s a YA inspired by one of last year’s recs, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: it follows its protagonist, Adam, throughout one hectic day that starts out with him buying flowers and ends with a party. In between he’s got to come to terms with a bunch of stuff going haywire in his life all at once, like being in love with his ex, his best friend leaving, sexual harassment at work, a nasty confrontation with his homophobic pastor father, and lingering fear after a local girl had been murdered. It’s a beautiful book.

(Patrick Ness is one of my favorites. Here’s a previous rec to another one of his books, More Than This.)