Books shelved under “Friendship”

Last year I reviewed the internet’s favourite ace dad’s book I Am Ace: Advice on Living Your Best Asexual Life. Now, Cody Daigle-Orians is back with The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide: Making It Work in Friendship, Love, and Sex. While both books are aimed at aspec readers, this latter is a more focused and broader exploration of the nature of relationships—of all kinds—as an acespec or arospec person. Jessica Kingsley Publishers has…

What’s worse than not having a place in the world? Finding your place only to feel like it might be ripped away from you. Claudie Arseneault dangles this prospect in front of readers with Flooded Secrets, the second book in her Chronicles of Nerezia series of novellas. I was impressed by Awakenings because it felt so cozy. This book builds on that success while also revealing the first layer of even more potent themes…

What’s better than a romcom? A story about friendship in the style of a romcom. Dear Wendy checks off so many boxes that it’s actually eerie: aro/ace protagonists, supportive secondary cast, plenty of humour, and a compassionate story to its core. This was one of my most-anticipated books of 2024, and that does not surprise me. I received an eARC from NetGalley and publisher Feiwel & Friends in exchange for a review.

Sophie and Jo…

Where do I start? Do I lament sheepishly how I’ve slept on bell hooks my entire adult life, and it is only now, at thirty-three, now that she has passed, that I’ve made time to read even one of her books? Do I confess that this was a revelation, that it was exactly the book I needed here and now? This review will be purely encomium, for that is what I feel about All About…

Once more, Holly Bourne has done the nearly impossible: she has made me feel sympathy for the plight of white straight cis women.

Fern is thirty-one at the beginning of Girl Friends (published as When We Were Friends in North America, but I didn’t realize it was being published here simultaneously and pre-ordered a UK copy instead). Her best friend from adolescence, Jessica, suddenly re-enters her life. But Jessica used to be a hot mess,…

This book had me at its opening scene, set in a tea store, where Darius talks to us for the first of many times about his love for properly steeped looseleaf teas. But then it had to go and introduce frequent, detailed allusions to Star Trek: The Next Generation, complete with Darius declaring that Captain Picard is the best captain, and … reader, at that point, I would have hid a dead body for…

Ordinarily, a book with this kind of ending angers me, but I think I was already angry with The Subtweet—in a good way. Ironically it took a Scot recommending me, a Canadian, this book by fellow Canadian author Vivek Shraya. So it goes. I was asking for recommendations for novels by trans authors that aren’t about “trans stuff.” As much as I love reading about trans experiences from trans authors, I believe it is…

I think I finally have the answer if someone ever asks me who my favourite poet is. Longtime readers of my reviews will know of my ambivalence towards poetry. I don’t want to malign an entire form, yet at the same time poetry has never transported me the same way a novel does. Until, that is, I started reading amanda lovelace’s poems. My reviews of the mermaid’s voice returns in this one and her earlier…

This is my 1700th review per my website’s official count (counts on other places, like Goodreads and The StoryGraph, might be slightly off because of import issues/what gets counted as a “review”)!! I didn’t choose Bookishly Ever After for my 1700th review on purpose, but I couldn’t think of a more deserving book for this arbitrary milestone. Lucy Powrie concludes the trilogy began in The Paper & Hearts Society and furthered in Read with Pride…

I have listened to Jenn and Trin’s Friendshipping podcast for a couple of years now. I adore it, mostly for their amusing and endearing banter, but also for their compassionate takes on listener questions about doing friendship—I enjoy their emphasis on this idea that friendship is a verb, because I agree. So when I heard they had turned their podcast into a self-help book, I pre-ordered the hell out of it—and I was also fortunate…

Every writer with each novel hones their craft. One of my joys in writing reviews of each of an author’s novels, in the order they’ve been written, is getting to see that development over time. (Meanwhile, my own review-writing skills have developed and changed over the years.) In Non Pratt’s case, Every Little Piece of My Heart showcases how her talents at characterization and particularly perspective have evolved over the years. With each novel, Pratt…

I was so excited to read the sequel to The Paper & Hearts Society, and Lucy Powrie does not disappoint. Read with Pride is another perfect blend of young adult drama, social awareness, and of course, a shameless love of books.

Olivia Santos (confirmed demisexual, woo!) learns at the start of Year Eleven that her school now requires parental permission to borrow books from the library—all because one parent complained about her son having…

Longtime Twitter follower of Hannah Moskowitz, first time reader. Why did I pick Not Otherwise Specified? No idea! This was the one that came up and got added to my to-read list. No regrets.

Trigger warning, obviously, for discussions of eating disorder and weight loss. Also for use of potential queer slurs, bullying, and depictions of controlling/manipulative behaviour from friends.

Etta Sinclair is a Black, bisexual girl at an all-girls school. Her decision to…

Let’s start with this: The Paper & Hearts Society is the kind of book I would have definitely loved as a teenager. Lucy Powrie combines her love of contemporary young adult fiction and classics with a captivating story of moving on from fractured friendships and bullying to create a great story brimming with allusions.

Tabby Brown is a fifteen-year-old book nerd moving to a new town over the summer. Somewhat introverted and anxious, Tabby isn't…

Having not read the graphic novels that started this series, I can’t compare them to Giant Days the novel. Nevertheless, the fingerprints of comic form are all over this book. By this I mean that Non Pratt manages to replicate the slight zaniness inherent in any comic universe, even one purporting to be as prosaic as a story about three people in university. This shouldn’t always work in the novel form (it’s why so many…

Last year, Sara Barnard dazzled me with Beautiful Broken Things. Now, thanks to NetGalley and Pan MacMillan, I got my digital hands on an eARC for the sequel: Fierce Fragile Hearts is narrated by Suzanne and tells the story of what happens to her months after the conclusion of Beautiful Broken Things. This book is just as good, if not better than, the first one. Every time I didn’t think it could get…

Some books don’t work for me even as they leave me stunned, impressed, or moved. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is one such book. Benjamin Alire Sáenz makes me cry at points with his writing, which is definitely beautiful. Yet neither the story itself nor the characters end up doing much for me.

Aristotle (Ari, he calls himself) is a Mexican–American teenager growing up in the 1980s. One summer he meets…

Funny status update concerning this book and my friend hoping to give it to me as a present. But ever since I kicked off my year with Alice Oseman’s sublime Radio Silence, I was ready to pre-order I Was Born for This. I was slightly more hesitant to dive in after being disappointed by Solitaire, so let me start by saying that Oseman has won me back over. This is a great…

Sherlock Holmes was, unsurprisingly, my jam when I was a kid. I preferred Poirot, even then (just something about Christie’s writing or the Belgian detective’s emphasis on his “little grey cells”), but Sherlock was cool too. I love reading stories that try to put a new spin on the Conan Doyle adventures, whether it’s transposing them to the 22nd century, hiring Ian McKellen to play a dementia-ridden Holmes, or gender-swapping Holmes and sending her to…

Reading Beautiful Broken Things made me really want to re-read A Quiet Kind of Thunder. I don’t know—this one was just so good that I was reminded of how much I enjoyed the other, which I think is a much more heartwarming story than this one. And that’s not to say that this one is bad, but there are moods for things. Parts of this story made me cry. Parts of it made my…