Book picks similar to
The Family Way by Christopher DiRaddo
fiction
canada
lgbtq
queer
Everything Is Awful and You're a Terrible Person
Daniel Zomparelli - 2017
With wry abandon and a beguiling heart, Everything Is Awful and You're a Terrible Person is a deadpan, tragicomic exploration of love, desire, and dysfunction in the twenty-first century.Daniel Zomparelli is editor and founder of Poetry Is Dead magazine, and the author of the poetry collections Davie Street Translations and (with Dina Del Bucchia) Rom Com. This is his first work of fiction.
The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller - 2011
Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite risking the gods' wrath.They are trained by the centaur Chiron in the arts of war and medicine, but when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, all the heroes of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the cruel Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.
The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker
Lauren James - 2020
Welcome to the afterlife.”What if death is only the beginning?When Harriet Stoker dies after falling from a balcony in a long-abandoned building, she discovers a group of ghosts, each with a special power.Felix, Kasper, Rima and Leah welcome Harriet into their world, eager to make friends with the new arrival after decades alone. Yet Harriet is more interested in unleashing her own power, even if it means destroying everyone around her. But when all of eternity is at stake, the afterlife can be a dangerous place to make an enemy.
I Hope You Get This Message
Farah Naz Rishi - 2019
Seven days. The Earth might end in seven days.When news stations start reporting that Earth has been contacted by a planet named Alma, the world is abuzz with rumors that the alien entity is giving mankind only few days to live before they hit the kill switch on civilization.For high school truant Jesse Hewitt, though, nothing has ever felt permanent. Not the guys he hooks up with. Not the jobs his underpaid mom works so hard to hold down. Life has dealt him one bad blow after another — so what does it matter if it all ends now? Cate Collins, on the other hand, is desperate to use this time to find the father she’s never met, the man she grew up hearing wild stories about, most of which she didn’t believe. And then there’s Adeem Khan. While coding and computer programming have always come easily to him, forgiveness doesn’t. He can’t seem to forgive his sister for leaving, even though it’s his last chance.With only seven days to face their truths and right their wrongs, Jesse, Cate, and Adeem’s paths collide even as their worlds are pulled apart.
Master of One
Jaida Jones - 2020
Gallows humor. A queer romance.Rags is a thief—an excellent one. He's stolen into noble's coffers, picked soldier's pockets, and even liberated a ring or two off the fingers of passersby. Until he's caught by the Queensguard and forced to find an ancient fae relic for a sadistic royal sorcerer.But Rags could never have guessed this "relic" would actually be a fae himself—a distractingly handsome, annoyingly perfect, ancient fae prince called Shining Talon. Good thing Rags can think on his toes, because things just get stranger from there...
Because You'll Never Meet Me
Leah Thomas - 2015
Ollie is allergic to electricity. Contact with it causes debilitating seizures. Moritz’s weak heart is kept pumping by an electronic pacemaker. If they ever did meet, Ollie would seize. But Moritz would die without his pacemaker. Both hermits from society, the boys develop a fierce bond through letters that become a lifeline during dark times—as Ollie loses his only friend, Liz, to the normalcy of high school and Moritz deals with a bully set on destroying him.A story of impossible friendship and hope under strange circumstances, this debut is powerful, dark and humorous in equal measure. These extraordinary voices bring readers into the hearts and minds of two special boys who, like many teens, are just waiting for their moment to shine.
Complementary and Acute
Ella Lyons - 2015
She’s captain of the Number Ninjas, her schedule is perfect, and her best friend Jacqueline Flores is going to be right by her side for all of it. But on the first day back at Dearington, Jac throws a wrench in Anabelle’s tidy plans. Not only has she rearranged her classes and dropped Number Ninjas, she’s joined the Girls who Like Girls Program, leaving Anabelle’s entire schedule in upheaval. Jac is never around anymore, and when she is, she’s got new friends (who Anabelle hates) or she’s running off to a lecture on alternative footwear. Anabelle is left to deal with the changes on her own, and suddenly, Jac’s inability to keep their dorm room tidy is the very least of Anabelle’s problems.
Feral Youth
Shaun David HutchinsonMarieke Nijkamp - 2017
The teens are a diverse group who come from all walks of life, and they were all sent to Zeppelin Bend as a last chance to get them to turn their lives around. They’ve just spent nearly two weeks learning to survive in the wilderness, and now their instructors have dropped them off eighteen miles from camp with no food, no water, and only their packs, and they’ll have to struggle to overcome their vast differences if they hope to survive.Inspired by The Canterbury Tales, Feral Youth features characters, each complex and damaged in their own ways, who are enticed to tell a story (or two) with the promise of a cash prize. The stories range from noir-inspired revenge tales to mythological stories of fierce heroines and angry gods. And while few of the stories are claimed to be based in truth, they ultimately reveal more about the teller than the truth ever could.
Last Seen Leaving
Caleb Roehrig - 2016
How can he uncover her secrets without revealing his own?Flynn's girlfriend, January, is missing. The cops are asking questions he can't answer, and her friends are telling stories that don't add up. All eyes are on Flynn—as January's boyfriend, he must know something.But Flynn has a secret of his own. And as he struggles to uncover the truth about January's disappearance, he must also face the truth about himself.
Penhallow Amid Passing Things
Iona Datt Sharma - 2018
In a coastal village in eighteenth-century Cornwall, Penhallow -- an honourable smuggler par excellence -- has more pressing problems. One of her boys has just been hauled up before the magistrates. A mysterious King's messenger has arrived from London. Something nasty -- and possibly magical -- is afoot in the smugglers' caves beneath water.And then there's Trevelyan, the town's austere, beautiful Revenue officer..."An author to watch: Iona Datt Sharma's Penhallow Amid Passing Things skilfully builds a strange magical Cornwall with a lovely understated f/f Revenue/smuggler romance that I wanted a lot more of." -- K.J. Charles, author of A Charm of Magpies"What’s not to like about a genderbent tale about age-old rivalry between smugglers and Revenue inspectors, with magic thrown in for good measure?" -- Bookdaze"Lyrical and stunning" -- Candid Ceillie
Spelling Mississippi
Marnie Woodrow - 2002
Suddenly, a woman clad in full evening dress, from rhinestone tiara to high heels, takes a running leap off the wharf into the Mississippi. Cleo watches, astonished, then turns and runs, mistakenly assuming the jumper is dead — a suicide.But Madeline, it turns out, is not bent on suicide. She is irresistibly drawn to water, as is Cleo, who was conceived during the great flood in Florence in 1966. Perhaps it is this shared obsession with the murky depths that fuels Cleo’s determination to find Madeline. She pounds the quaint streets of New Orleans, city of cheap bourbon, rich turtle soup, the scent of magnolias and A Streetcar Named Desire.Spelling Mississippi is filled with all the bristling energy of Fall on Your Knees. Told with great humour and affection, it is a seductive, liberating story about ties that bind and those that simply restrain, and a lesson not in spelling but forgiveness.
We Are the Ants
Shaun David Hutchinson - 2016
Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button.Only he isn’t sure he wants to.After all, life hasn’t been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend’s suicide last year.Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him.But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push the button and save the planet and everyone on it…or let the world—and his pain—be destroyed forever.
Next Year, for Sure
Zoey Leigh Peterson - 2017
They speak in the shorthand they have invented, complete one another’s sentences, and help each other through every daily and existential dilemma. When Chris tells Kathryn about his feelings for Emily, a vivacious young woman he sees often at the Laundromat, Kathryn encourages her boyfriend to pursue this other woman—certain that her bond with Chris is strong enough to weather a little side dalliance.As Kathryn and Chris stumble into polyamory, Next Year, For Sure tracks the tumultuous, revelatory, and often very funny year that follows. When Chris’s romance with Emily grows beyond what anyone anticipated, both Chris and Kathryn are invited into Emily’s communal home, where Kathryn will discover new romantic possibilities of her own. In the confusions, passions, and upheavals of their new lives, both Kathryn and Chris will be forced to reconsider their past and what they thought they knew about love.Offering a luminous portrait of a relationship from two perspectives, Zoey L. Paterson has written an empathic, beautiful, and tremendously honest novel about a great love pushed to the edge. Deeply poignant and hugely entertaining, Next Year, For Sure shows us what lies at the mysterious heart of relationships, and what true openness and transformation require.
Sweet & Bitter Magic
Adrienne Tooley - 2021
But after committing the worst magical sin, she’s exiled by the ruling Coven and cursed with the inability to love. The only way she can get those feelings back—even for just a little while—is to steal love from others.Wren is a source—a rare kind of person who is made of magic, despite being unable to use it herself. Sources are required to train with the Coven as soon as they discover their abilities, but Wren—the only caretaker to her ailing father—has spent her life hiding her secret.When a magical plague ravages the queendom, Wren’s father falls victim. To save him, Wren proposes a bargain: if Tamsin will help her catch the dark witch responsible for creating the plague, then Wren will give Tamsin her love for her father.Of course, love bargains are a tricky thing, and these two have a long, perilous journey ahead of them—that is, if they don't kill each other first..