http://mppl.org/books-movies-more/lists-and-suggestions/?category=books&list=Celebrating+LGBTQIA%2B+Voices
List: Celebrating LGBTQIA+ Voices
The Pairing
Theo and Kit have been a lot of things: childhood best friends, crushes, in love, and now estranged exes. After a brutal breakup on the transatlantic flight to their dream European food and wine tour, they exited each other's lives once and for all. Time apart has done them good. Theo has found confidence as a hustling bartender by night and aspiring sommelier by day, with a long roster of casual lovers. Kit, who never returned to America, graduated as the reigning sex god of his pastry school class and now bakes at one of the finest restaurants in Paris. Sure, nothing really compares to what they had, and life stretches out long and lonely ahead of them, but--yeah. It's in the past. All that remains is the unused voucher for the European tour that never happened, good for 48 months after its original date and about to expire. Four years later, it seems like a great idea to finally take the trip. Solo. Separately. It's not until they board the tour bus that they discover they've both accidentally had the exact same idea, and now they're trapped with each other for three weeks of stunning views, luscious flavors, and the most romantic cities of France, Spain, and Italy. It's fine. There's nothing left between them. So much nothing that, when Theo suggests a friendly wager to see who can sleep with their hot Italian tour guide first, Kit is totally game. And why stop there? Why not a full-on European hookup competition? But sometimes a taste of everything only makes you crave what you can't have.
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Cinema Love
A staggering, tender epic about gay men in rural China and the women who marry them. For over thirty years, Old Second and Bao Mei have cobbled together a meager existence in New York City's Chinatown. But unlike other couples, these two share an unusual past. In rural Fuzhou, before they emigrated, they frequented the Workers' Cinema: a theater where gay men cruised for love. While classic war films played, Old Second and his countrymen found intimacy in the screening rooms. In the box office, Bao Mei sold movie tickets to closeted men, guarding their secrets and finding her own happiness with the projectionist. But when Old Second's passion for his male lover is revealed, a series of haunting events unfold, propelling these characters toward an uncertain future in America.
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Best Men
Max Moody thought he had everything figured out, including having the best friend a gay guy could ask for: Paige. She grew up with Max. She can light up any party. She finishes his sentences. She is always a reliable splunch (not brunch) partner. But then everything in Max's life is turned upside down when Paige announces some big news: she's engaged and wants Max to be her best man. But it turns out there's not just one new man in Paige's life--there are two. There's the groom, Austin, who's a perfectly nice guy. And then there's his charming, younger, and really hot gay brother, Chasten, who is Austin's best man. As Paige's wedding draws closer, Max and Chasten realize they're like oil and water, yet they still have to figure out how to coexist in Paige's life while not making her wedding all about them. But can the tiny spark between them elevate their best man roles into becoming the best men in each other's lives?
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Martyr!
Cyrus Shams, the novel's hero, is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: a mother whose plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident and a father whose life in America was circumscribed by killing chickens on a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet whose obsession with martyrs leads him into the mysteries of his past--toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying; and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she might not have been who or what she seemed. Cyrus is guided on his journey by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, and delivered ... to a world that teems with unforeseen wonders.
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The Celebrants
It's been a minute--or five years--since Jordan Vargas last saw his college friends, and twenty-eight years since their graduation from Berkeley when their adult lives officially began. Now Jordan, Jordy, Naomi, Craig, and Marielle find themselves at the brink of a new decade, with all the responsibilities of adulthood, yet no closer to having their lives figured out. Though not for lack of trying. Over the years, they've reunited in Big Sur to honor a decades-old pact to throw each other living 'funerals,' celebrations to remind themselves that life is worth living--that their lives mean something, to one another if not to themselves. But this reunion is different. They're not gathered as they were to bolster Marielle as her marriage crumbled, to lift Naomi after her parents died, or to intervene when Craig pleaded guilty to art fraud. This time, Jordan is sitting on a secret that will upend their pact. A deeply honest tribute to the growing pains of selfhood and the people who keep us going.
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Siren Queen
Luli Wei is beautiful, talented, and desperate to be a star. Coming of age in pre-Code Hollywood, she knows how dangerous the movie business is and how limited the roles are for a Chinese American girl from Hungarian Hill--but she doesn't care. She'd rather play a monster than a maid. But in Luli's world, the worst monsters in Hollywood are not the ones on screen. The studios want to own everything from her face to her name to the women she loves, and they run on a system of bargains made in blood and ancient magic, powered by the endless sacrifice of unlucky starlets like her. For those who do survive to earn their fame, success comes with a steep price. Luli is willing to do whatever it takes--even if that means becoming the monster herself.
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City of Laughter
Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an eighteenth century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to bring laughter to the celebrants at a Jewish wedding, receives a visitation froma mysterious stranger, triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century. In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first queer love and grieving the death of her father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her spare time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family's mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother Mira, about whom no one speaks. What she finds in Poland will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present, a life shaped by ancestral forces that originated long before she was born.
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Family Meal
Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, unexpected, and explosive. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said--and left unsaid--to save each other?
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The (Fake) Dating Game
Holden James picked the worst time to have a meltdown. His chance to audition for his favorite game show, Madcap Market, should have been a moment of triumph...instead he's destroying the minibar in a grim Los Angeles hotel room...recently dumped, partnerless and sliding into misery...All Holden knows about Leo Min is that he's beautiful and unexpectedly sympathetic, and the chemistry between them is beyond. Maybe it's even enough to convince everyone, including the show's casting directors, that they're a real couple. All they'd have to do is crush the competition, win the huge cash prize and all of Holden's problems...will be fixed.
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Here We Go Again
A queer rom-com following once childhood best friends forced together to drive their former teacher across the country.
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The House in the Cerulean Sea
Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge Of Magical Youth, he spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages. When Linus is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management he's given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel to Marsyas Island Orphanage, where six dangerous children reside. Linus must set aside his fears and determine whether or not they're likely to bring about the end of days. Their caretaker is the charming and enigmatic Arthur Parnassus, who will do anything to keep his wards safe. As Arthur and Linus grow closer, long-held secrets are exposed, and Linus must make a choice: destroy a home or watch the world burn.
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How We Named the Stars
When Daniel de La Luna arrives as a scholarship student at an elite East Coast university, he bears the weight of his family's hopes and dreams, and the burden of sharing his late uncle's name. Daniel flounders at first--but then Sam, his roommate, changes everything. As their relationship evolves from brotherly banter to something more intimate, Daniel soon finds himself in love with a man who helps him see himself in a new light. But just as their relationship takes flight, Daniel is pulled away, first by Sam's hesitation and then by a brutal turn of events that changes Daniel's life forever. As he grapples with profound loss, Daniel finds himself in his family's ancestral homeland in México for the summer, facing a host of new questions: What will Ithaca mean without Sam? How does the person he is connect with this place his family comes from? And how might he reconcile the many parts of himself as he learns to move forward?
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The Last Place You Look
Nobody knows what happened to Sarah Cook. The beautiful blonde teenager disappeared fifteen years ago, the same night her parents were brutally murdered in their suburban Ohio home. Her boyfriend, Brad Stockton--black and from the wrong side of the tracks--was convicted of the murders and is now on death row. Though he's maintained his innocence all along, the clock is running out. His execution is only weeks away when his devoted sister insists she spied Sarah at an area gas station. Willing to try anything, she hires PI Roxane Weary to look at the case and see if she can locate Sarah...
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Love and Hot Chicken : A Delicious Southern Novel
Returning home to Pennywhistle, Tennessee, for her beloved daddy's funeral, PJ Spoon, abandoning her PhD program at Vanderbilt, impulsively takes a job as a fry cook at the Chickie Shak, where she meets and falls for Boof, a talented singer-songwriter searching for her birth mother.
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All the Birds in the Sky
Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn't expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during middle school. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one's peers and families. But now they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who's working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world's magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world's every-growing ailments. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them, something begun years ago in their youth, is determined to bring them together to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages. A deeply magical, darkly funny examination of life, love, and the apocalypse.
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built
It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools. Centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again. Centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot has one question: 'What do people need?' But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They're going to need to ask it a lot.
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The Surviving Sky
High above a jungle-planet float the last refuges of humanity--plant-made civilizations held together by tradition, technology, and arcane science. Here, architects are revered deeply, with humanity's survival reliant on a privileged few. If not for their abilities, the cities would plunge into the devastating earthrage storms below. Charismatic and powerful, Iravan is one such architect. His abilities are his identity, but to Ahilya, his archeologist wife, they are a method to suppress non-architects. Their marriage is thorny and fraught--yet when a jungle expedition goes terribly wrong, jeopardizing their careers, Ahilya and Iravan must work together to save their reputations. But as their city begins to plummet, their discoveries threaten not only their marriage, but their entire civilization.
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Where the Drowned Girls Go
Welcome to the Whitethorn Institute. The first step is always admitting you need help, and you've already taken that step by requesting a transfer into our company.' There is another school for children who fall through doors and fall back out again. It isn't as friendly as Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children. And it isn't as safe. When Eleanor West decided to open her school, her sanctuary, her Home for Wayward Children, she knew from the beginning that there would be children she couldn't save. When Cora decides she needs a different direction, a different fate, a different prophecy, Miss West reluctantly agrees to transfer her to the other school, where things are run very differently by Whitethorn, the Headmaster. She will soon discover that not all doors are welcoming...
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