Pride
Swarthmore celebrated Pride Month on June 1 with a picnic, a drag queen story hour hosted by the public library, and a booth where the Swarthmore Human Relations Commission invited people to do an activity exploring the complexities of identity–which is also what good books do. Vendors sold cool, pride-themed merchandise. Next year, Celia Bookshop hopes to be among them.
Photo: Jayatri Das
There are so many great queer books these days!
When I was in college in the 1980s, I remember discovering Rita Mae Brown’s classic autobiographical novel Rubyfruit Jungle and being blown away that someone was writing so vividly and joyously about lesbians!
More recently, I learned that Brown, who went on to a prolific career writing mysteries, was an item with the sublime Martina Navratilova until the tennis player called it off, apparently worried that coming out might nix her application for U.S. citizenship–a concern that has potently reemerged for many queer people now. (Martina has also written quite a few books, including the tennis-related murder mystery Killer Instinct.
Even just in the Philly area, there are so many amazing queer books and authors that I don’t have time to write about them all here. But I am going to write about a few.
Recommendations
First, meet debut author Jess Callans. Jess lives in Delco and published his first middle-grade novel, Ollie in Between, in April. The book, which has been called a contemporary Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret, made the cover of Booklist, has been getting great reviews, and was an American Booksellers Association Kids Indie Next pick. Keep an eye out for programming by Callans at Celia next fall!
Photo: Jess Callans
Ollie In Between
By Jess Callans
I don’t even need to unfold the paper to know what it says, but I take a breath and open it anyway, desperately hoping that no one will realize I’ve just drawn my own question out of Mrs. Johnson’s super-anonymous sex-ed question box.
And I have to read it.
Out loud.
To the whole class.
The opening of this novel is super awkward, and it also makes me laugh, which is a fantastic combination. Partly it’s the content–how can the reader not be drawn in, wondering what question Ollie wants the answer to? But partly, too, it’s the way Callans reveals the moment to us–the anxious rush of that paragraph-long sentence followed by the slow doling out of those three single-sentence paragraphs, each one hitting us like a drop of icy water down the back of our necks. And I have to read it. Out loud. To the whole class.
The sense of rhythm here, and the balance between humor and adolescent agony, runs all through this book, which follows Ollie on their journey to figure out what it means not want to grow up to be a woman, how to manage the fact that their older sister is moving in with her boyfriend, how to let go of old friends and embrace new ones, and how to stand up for themself and the people they love.
Housemates
By Emma Copley Eisenberg
Where I lived then, there was no photography, no movies, no books, no art of any kind.
It was enough to make me wonder why I had ever spent so long on it. Art! It had once been my whole day. My whole experience of living.
To celebrate the paperback of her lovely and strange Pennsylvania road trip novel (it’s also a queer artist love story featuring a large-format photographer and a writer), Emma Copley Eisenberg has made a very short video about some of the responses she’s gotten to the book: “It’s been so cool to see the way readers have been excited about the queer group house, the road trip, joyful depictions of fat bodies in fiction. But most of all, the thing I hear most from readers is that this novel made them want to make art again.”
That art-making is the soul of this novel you can read in its first lines. After the death of her lover, our unnamed narrator has fallen into a darkness where there is no more art for her. But you can hear her hunger for it, even amid her confusion about its former place in her life.
I love how “Art!” gets its own sentence here–complete with an exclamation point! I love how you can hear the narrator’s longing for it in the simple monosyllables, like a bell tolling, of the next sentence: “It had once been my whole day.”
We are often told not to judge a book by its cover, but of course we do. With its vibrant color scheme, Housemates is always catching my eye on my own shelves, in stores, and other people’s houses, giving me a burst of delight every time.
Bathe the Cat
Written by Alice B. McGinty
Illustrated by David Roberts
Come on folks, it’s time to clean!
Upstairs, downstairs, in-between.
These opening lines serve as a staid cornerstone from which McGinty and Roberts launch their rollicking, silly, colorful story of a family trying to clean the house before Grandma comes, and of the wily cat that does its best to prevent them.
The chaos this disrupting feline creates is not of the same kind or order as that of its more famous hat-wearing cousin, just as the brightly dressed family of this book is quite unlike Theodore Geissel’s traditional white 1950s clan. As for this story’s goldfish–while they do get a bit of a scare, they are not terrorized by being balanced on the handle of an umbrella, but are ultimately–adorably–fed by a girl in a yellow dinosaur suit. Heaven.
Gender Queer
By Maia Kobabe
“Do you have everything?”
When I learned that this graphic memoir from 2020 is among the most banned books in America, I was curious to read it. It’s a beautiful and tender story about a kid growing up feeling neither like a girl nor a boy. The drawings are gorgeous, and there is plenty of room for both love and pain–as in any coming-of-age tale.
I like that this story starts not with a statement but with a question–a loving question from a father to their kid heading off for college. Because, after all, this memoir is about questioning: Who am I? Why am I different from other people? Is it okay to be this different?
I also love that Kobabe gets the word everything into that first sentence, because everything is exactly what this character wants: all the male parts and all the female parts too.
Can Maia actually have everything? No. But acceptance, and self-acceptance, are out there waiting, and that’s probably enough.
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