Cover Love - 2023 Rainbow List
While we don’t judge people around here, we do sometimes judge books by their covers.
And one of my favorite Cover Love book displays every year is based on the American Library Association’s Rainbow List. One of the ALA’s subcommittees releases a list of their favorite LGBTQ+ books published in the previous calendar year. They do books for kids and teens mostly, though crossover books absolutely make it in from time to time. And each year, I put some of the book covers onto a graphic for my teen readers and make it look like a rainbow.
So this year, I did one for you. It’s a mix of adult and teen books, pulled from both their lists and a few additions of my own for the sake of aesthetic. It’s not all of any of their lists because, as you can see below, I’m going for a rainbow.
You can click here to open this image in an interactive window.
Not feeling judgy?
I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston was LOL funny, reminiscent of John Green’s Paper Towns, but with more diversity and an important message about how you do not have be only one thing and that one thing does not have to define who you are. It was a good reminder that we are all just always searching for ourselves in the chaos.
Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake is ostensibly a queer romance, but to be honest, that's not really the story. Delilah and Claire are cute for sure, but this story isn't really about that. It's about grief and the crazy things it can do to you. It's about how hard family can be, especially when it's not what you were expecting to get or to have. And it's about how hard relationships are just in general, whether they're family or lovers or anything in between and around.
I just talked about A Million Quiet Revolutions by Robin Gow for Trans Day of Visibility but it bears highlighting here as well. It’s driven by lots of coming of age, lots of topics covered outside of the LGBTQ+ area, a positive ending, good family dynamics, and excellent poetry (this is a novel in verse).
Lavender House by Lev A.C. Rosen was a very nice queer period piece mystery set in 1950s San Francisco and the start of a series.
Not Good For Maidens by Tori Bovalino is a queer horror retelling of the poem Goblin Market by Christina Rosetti, which is really interesting. Moonflower is National Book Award winner Kacen Callender. Answers in the Pages, I Was Born For This, She Gets the Girl, and The Sunbearer Trials, are all by beloved authors (David Levithan, Alice Oseman, Rachael Lippincott, and Aiden Thomas, respectively).
And many of the others have been on my to-read list for entirely too long.
Read books and be an ally. xoxo Lai