Let’s Get Back to the Party by Zak Salih (288 pp, Algonquin Books, 2021).It is 2015, weeks after the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, and all Sebastian Mote wants is to settle down. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family-and raise the baby together?
When Ames’s boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she’s pregnant with his baby-and that she’s not sure whether she wants to keep it-Ames wonders if this is the chance he’s been waiting for. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese-and losing her meant losing his only family. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn’t hate. Ages 14-17.ĭetransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (352 pp, One World, 2021). But their romance takes a turn when test results reveal exactly why Mabel has been feeling low-key sick all summer and suddenly it’s Audre who is caring for Mabel as she faces a deeply uncertain future. Mabel quickly falls hard for Audre and is determined to take care of her as she tries to navigate an American high school. Mabel’s reverie is cut short when her father announces that his best friend and his just-arrived-from-Trinidad daughter are coming for dinner. Minneapolis, MN: Sixteen-year-old Mabel is lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to figure out why she feels the way she feels-about her ex Terrell, about her girl Jada and that moment they had in the woods, and about the vague feeling of illness that’s plagued her all summer. Told in two distinct and irresistible voices, Junauda Petrus’s bold and lyrical debut is the story of two black girls from very different backgrounds finding love and happiness in a world that seems determined to deny them both.
The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus (320 pp, Penguin Books, 2020).