First up, the All the Books books! There’s Always Next Year by Leah Johnson and George M. Johnson is a cute YA romance with two points of view and two queer romances (M/M and F/F). Almost the entire book takes place on New Year’s Day, and it felt like a teen holiday movie—if those movies starred queer Black teens, which they should.
The Curse of the Cole Women by Marielle Thompson was my other ATB pick. It’s a sapphic gothic novel, which I can’t get enough of. This one follows three generations of women who take care of a lighthouse on a tiny island. They’ve been cursed so that there are only ever two Cole women: when the youngest gets pregnant, her mother walks into the sea. My favourite storyline was, of course, the one with two women falling in love in the 1950s while building a library together. (Check the content warnings on this one, though: it’s definitely not a romance novel.)
My book club convinced me to finally pick up one of the biggest queer books of the year: Atmosphere: A Love Story by Taylor Jenkins Reid. And yes, I cried. At least three times.
The other queer book club I’m in (yes, I’m in two in-person queer book clubs) picked Hungerstone by Kat Dunn, a Carmilla retelling I’ve been excited to pick up. This one was a little disappointing; it felt like the first and second halves didn’t quite fit together.
Finally, I read The Last Session Vol. 2 by Jasmine Walls, Micah Myers, and Dozerdraws. These series follows groups of friends playing D&D together, with the drama playing out both in the game and above the table. I liked the concept and the art in the first volume, but the story didn’t work for me. I’m glad I picked up the second book anyway, because I had a great time with it! It follows a friend group who played together in high school and never finished their campaign. As adults, they try to get back together to finish it, but first they have to resolve the friendship issues that drove them apart.