Trans people have always existed. Transgender Day of Remembrance is November 20th. This is a day to mark the lives lost to violence in the transgender community. Here are some books that capture the history, complexity, and dynamism of the trans experience. Annotations from NoveList, unless otherwise attributed. (Created November 2024)
Old Wounds
Two transgender teens embark on a cross-country road trip, only to find their journey interrupted when their car breaks down in a small Kentucky town that sacrifices girls to a forest-dwelling monster.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
View Old WoundsHow to Live Free in A Dangerous World
Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View How to Live Free in A Dangerous WorldCafé Con Lychee
Theo Mori and Gabriel Moreno have always been at odds. Their parents own rival businesses-an Asian American cafe and a Puerto Rican bakery-and Gabi's lack of coordination has cost their soccer team too many games to count. Can they put aside their differences long enough to save their parents'shops or will the new feelings between them boil over?
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Café Con LycheeBe Kind, My Neighbour
It's 1973, the town of Baths, cozy middle-of-nowhere American heartland. Traveling musician Wegg rolls in, content to busk for a beat and be on his merry way once more. That is, until he meets Mr. Neighbor, the disarmingly sweet man made of cloth who offers him company and a place to stay. As the two grow closer, they click together just right, each harmonizing with the other's most secret self. Yet their growing romance is haunted by uncertainty and mystery...There's the town itself, plagued by repeated, ritualistic murders by the elusive Baths Heartbreaker. Then there's Neighbor, whose cheerful demeanor never falters, but who disappears like clockwork every month. And Wegg, who lives as though he's on borrowed time--what exactly is he afraid will catch up to him? A twisting graphic novel of love and deceit, all threaded together with lush psychedelia, folk horror, and a heaping helping of mirth. Turns out, sometimes the best way to conquer your past is to find a future. -- BiblioCommons
Format: Graphic Novel
Availability: Available
View Be Kind, My NeighbourLove After the End
This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous) writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism’s histories.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Love After the EndToo Bright to See
It's the summer before middle school and eleven-year-old Bug's best friend Moira has decided the two of them need to use the next few months to prepare. For Moira, this means figuring out the right clothes to wear, learning how to put on makeup, and deciding which boys are cuter in their yearbook photos than in real life. But none of this is all that appealing to Bug, who doesn't particularly want to spend more time trying to understand how to be a girl. Besides, there's something more important to worry about: A ghost is haunting Bug's eerie old house in rural Vermont...and maybe haunting Bug in particular. As Bug begins to untangle the mystery of who this ghost is and what they're trying to say, an altogether different truth comes to light--Bug is transgender.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Too Bright to SeeThe Woods All Black
Leslie is assigned to the backwoods town of Spar Creek by the Frontier Nursing Service, under its mandate: vaccinate the flock, birth babies, and weather the judgements of churchy locals. Forged in the fires of the Western Front and reborn in the cafes of Paris, Leslie believes he can handle whatever is thrown at him—but Spar Creek holds a darkness beyond his nightmares. Something ugly festers within the local congregation, and its malice has focused on a young person they insist is an unruly tomboy who must be brought to heel. Violence is bubbling, ready to spill over, and Leslie will have to act fast if he intends to be of use. But the woods are haunted in ways Leslie does not understand.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
View The Woods All BlackAnd Then I Got Fired
Feel free to scream directly into this book if you need to. It won't judge you, promise This book gets grief. The good, the bad and the snotty noses. Through a healthy mix of poems, personal testimony, bad jokes and choose-your-own-journey workbook style, ""And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer's Reflections on Grief, Unemployment & Inappropriate Jokes About Death"", is an unexpected and lively conversation between the author and reader on grief, Black Trans survival and the arts. Whether you are currently moving through grief mode, love a good poem, or just want some tools to deal with painful experiences, this book is for you. More importantly, this book is for all of us who deserve a place to be honest when things get hard. -- BiblioCommons
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View And Then I Got FiredTripping Arcadia
Working for one of Boston's most elite families, Lena, when she discovers they are responsible for the ruin of her own family, embarks on a poison-filled quest for revenge that leads her into a hedonistic world where she must decide how much she is willing to risk for payback.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Tripping ArcadiaLakelore
Everyone who lives near the lake knows the stories about the world underneath it, an ethereal landscape rumored to be half-air, half-water. But Bastián Silvano and Lore Garcia are the only ones who’ve been there. Bastián grew up both above the lake and in the otherworldly space beneath it. Lore’s only seen the world under the lake once, but that one encounter changed their life and their fate. Then the lines between air and water begin to blur. The world under the lake drifts above the surface. If Bastián and Lore don’t want it bringing their secrets to the surface with it, they have to stop it, and to do that, they have to work together. There’s just one problem: Bastián and Lore haven’t spoken in seven years, and working together means trusting each other with the very things they’re trying to hide.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Lakelore