There’s something for little kids, middle graders, and grown-ups in three great new LGBTQ-inclusive books out today! Check them out—especially because the queer content in the kids’ books isn’t immediately obvious!
Click titles or images for full reviews!
Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance, by Francesca T. Royster (Abrams Press). This memoir of queer motherhood is a rare and wonderful book: a lyrical story of Royster’s personal path into parenthood as a Black woman with a White wife, adopting a Black girl, but also a powerful look at larger ideas of parenthood, race, family and cultural history, systemic bias, and resistance. Royster, a professor of English and critical ethnic studies at DePaul University, allows her scholarship to inform her writing, but this is at heart a memoir, not an academic work. Yet while her story is deeply personal, Royster also weaves in larger concepts and reflections—about queerness and Blackness, queer motherhood, Black motherhood, chosen family, and more. I think it will be a rare reader of any identity who does not gain something meaningful from this moving, thoughtful, and stimulating book.
The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels, by Beth Lincoln, illustrated by Claire Powell (Dutton). Mix an Agatha Christie manor-house mystery with the wordplay of Norton Juster’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth, stir in the sisterly adventures of Little Women, a heap of Lemony Snicket gothic creepiness, and season with a queer sprinkle, and you might come up with something like this middle grade novel by Beth Lincoln. Lincoln evokes all of these but weaves a totally original tale of mystery and mayhem centered on an eccentric family living in a sprawling, ancient manor house.
Two significant characters are queer: one child is nonbinary and one woman is trans. (Another more minor character is a man with a husband.) The book does not focus on their queer identities, but nor does it ignore moments when those identities may have significance for their lives. An oddball series of secondary characters and a twisty plot make the book a delight, but Lincoln’s love of language is what makes it shine. There are eye-rolling puns, captivating archaisms, and dazzling descriptions—but under the fun of all this is an unexpectedly poignant and powerful message about finding who we are and how we fit into our families, both born and chosen.
Sugar Pie Lullaby: The Soul of Motown in a Song of Love, by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Sawyer Cloud (Sourcebooks). Two-mom and two-dad families are among the varied family types shown in this jazzy little book for young children by Carole Boston Weatherford, who has won an NAACP Image Award, a Coretta Scott King Award, and a Caldecott Honor for her previous work. Each page of this volume uses a line from a classic Motown hit to illuminate a gentle scene of family life. Weatherford, a poet as well as a prose author, weaves the lines together to form a whole, as parents and kids snuggle, read, bathe, dance, and more. While the lines could simply be spoken, much fun will be had, I think, by those who know the songs (or are motivated to learn them, guided by the backmatter in the book) and can use the pages as prompts to launch into their own family renditions. Sweet and delightful, with important representation of Black queer families.