News — MeToo

Black LGBTQ books got a bump in June of 2020. With the George Floyd protests at their peak and Pride month still happening, lists of queer Black books to buy or preorder built up steam on social media. You Should See Me in a Crown, a Black YA F/F novel, was sold out everywhere. Unfortunately, this follows a pattern that Black and LGBTQ books often see: a peak during Black History Month or Pride month, but forgotten in between. Or, a hateful act will make the news, whether it’s police brutality or violent transphobia or a worrying new law, book...

The weather is finally bringing with it some hope that spring (or, in the southern hemisphere, fall) is on the horizon, if it’s not here completely. With the new season comes a whole crop of exciting new spring 2021 YA books for your ever-growing TBR. As always, this list of new spring 2021 YA books will not be comprehensive, especially as book publication dates are still periodically shifting. With printing challenges due to paper sourcing and COVID-19, this might be the reality for a bit. Likewise, I’m curating this roundup early in 2021, prior to taking parental leave, so new books dropping...

Black LGBTQ books got a bump in June of 2020. With the George Floyd protests at their peak and Pride month still happening, lists of queer Black books to buy or preorder built up steam on social media. You Should See Me in a Crown, a Black YA F/F novel, was sold out everywhere. Unfortunately, this follows a pattern that Black and LGBTQ books often see: a peak during Black History Month or Pride month, but forgotten in between. Or, a hateful act will make the news, whether it’s police brutality or violent transphobia or a worrying new law, book...

March is Women’s History Month here in the United States, so today’s column is a collection of books about women! Counting the Stars: The Story of Katherine Johnson, NASA Mathematician written by Lesa Cline-Ransome, illustrated by Raúl Colón Thanks to the book and film Hidden Figures, a lot more people know about Katherine Johnson, one of NASA’s human “computers” responsible for calculating trajectories for launches, and it’s no surprise that there are also a number of picture books about her as well. This one has a little more text in it than a traditional picture book, so it’s great for a...

We asked our contributors to share the best book they read from January to March and there’s a lot of awesome books so reinforce your TBR shelf! We’ve got a juicy celebrity memoir, nonfiction that’ll stick with you, mythology, shmooching, horror, mystery and thriller, a delightful read, and much, much more. There are excellent book recommendations for so many reading tastes: some are old, some are new, and some aren’t even out yet—a future treat! And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges by Amber Sparks I was predisposed to like this collection of short stories—Amber and I...