The Happy Place 5: 5 Years, 5 Queer Favs
Happy pride month everyone! For this month’s The Happy Place 5 post, we of course had to choose a topic centered on queer books. We chose to highlight our 5 queer favs from the last 5 years! I both love and hate this topic. Love because obviously I love highlighting queer books, and there are so many amazing books to choose from. Hate because THERE ARE SO MANY AMAZING BOOKS TO CHOOSE FROM. It’s painful to only choose one book from each year hahaha. Plus so many of my favs were actually published in the same year. So just know that obviously I have way more favs than just these 5 haha. But now on to my actual picks!!
2022 – Kaikeyi
Kaikeyi is a retelling of the Hindu epic the Ramayana. This retelling focuses on the “evil stepmother” character from the original, the titular Kaikeyi. We follow her throughout her life, and come to understand her decisions and how it leads to her characterization as one of the villains of the Ramayana. If you haven’t read the original, don’t worry! I haven’t either. I honestly just did a quick read of the Wikipedia page to get an understanding of the basic story. But yeah the writing is beautiful, and the story really sucks you in. And though the words aren’t used on page, Kaikeyi is portrayed as aro/ace.
2021 – The God of Lost Words
This is the final book in the Hell’s Library trilogy. I wrote a full series review for it a while ago, which you can find here! Here’s an excerpt from that post on why you should read this series:
“Let’s get some bullet points down of some great things about this series:
- an interesting take on angels and demons!
- books that literally come to life?? hello how cool is that
- other afterlife realms (like, other than Heaven and Hell)
- beautiful writing – as you can see from the quotes I’ve included
- very good flow, the action is balanced so nicely with the quiet moments
- and there is SUCH GOOD CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
- FOR ALL OF THE CAST OF MAIN CHARACTERS
- and the character development happens in the midst of the action as well as in the quiet moments!! it’s so good
- on! page! pansexual! rep!
- great banter and happy moments
- yes, my favorite, found family – family that fights tooth and nail for each other”
There’s poly rep as well! So yes. Queer as fuck, and all in all a wonderful series.
2020 – When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain
This is the second novella in a series about a nonbinary cleric who travels to collect stories. You can read this as a standalone though if you haven’t read the first! Here is my review of WTTCDTM (wow that’s a long acronym). And also here are some things you can find in this novella (which I took from that review):
- a non-binary protagonist!!! they’re so frikkin cool (a cleric and recorder of stories!)
- a girl with a big mammoth and a lance
- tigers who can appear human but are DEFINITELY tigers
- stories!! everything about stories. stories about love and loss and betrayal and magic and everything. AND, how stories can save you. or kill you
- f/f romance
The first book is called The Empress of Salt and Fortune, and I reviewed it here.
2019 – Gideon the Ninth
You’ve definitely heard me rant about Gideon the Ninth before, either on here or on Bookstagram. It’s a murder mystery in space, with necromancy and lesbians and messy AF characters. IT’S AMAZING. There are also meme references – which admittedly isn’t everyone’s thing. But it is mine, and this book is one of my all time favorites.
2018 – A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe
Listen, we all know that found family is the best trope ever. This book (and series) has queer found family in the form of a ragtag space crew, which automatically makes it awesome. But there’s also spaceships and spaceship racing and treasure hunting and MAGIC. There’s tons of action and fighting, but there are also great character interactions. I’ve got a review of it here if you want to read that! I highly recommend this book and series, it’s one of my favs.
If you were choosing your 5 queer favs, what books would be on that list? Do we have any overlap?
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