100 books like Always Human

Binti combines some of my favorite flavors of science fiction into one bittersweet treat: brutal interspecies politics, cultural misunderstandings, and the struggle for coexistence in a galactic community.

The tragic encounter between students on their way to attend a prestigious university on another world and a violent alien species starts this story off with heart-pounding, heart-rending stakes. It goes on to interrogate war and peace between species and the act of true communication and tolerance.

Those who are interested in stories with a raw but hopeful outlook on what it would mean for multiple civilizations in the Milky Way to find harmony will enjoy this read.

This is the first issue of an excellent YA comic book series. I really do enjoy scifi that features apes or any kind of simian life (yes, I love the Planet of the Apes series), so this book got my attention with the cover. The main characters are all space monkeys or simian astronauts that have landed their spacecraft on an alien world. One unfortunate monkey is the chosen explorer while the others watch his progress from the relative safety of the spaceship. The story is tense and surprising. The art is very skilled and I truly look forward to the next issue of the series which is expected to be released soon.

The first book of a middle grade series, this book will leave you reeling. The Munchkins are 13 children with special powers like healing and making objects appear and for some reason they don’t age after they turn ten. Narrated by Capricorn Munch, one of the 13, they don’t seem to remember much of their own history but they now live with their adoptive father, when a very sinister neighbor moves in and upends their lives in more ways than they could imagine.

A tightly woven story that will take the reader on an intense journey. This multi-award-winning book is perfect for fans of The Umbrella Academy or Harry Potter.

This graphic novel is stunningly illustrated with deeply relatable characters. Pan is a young woman on a remote world working in her father’s body shop and sneaks out at night to visit her friend, Tara, and sometimes they go dancing. Tara’s life was not her own. As a princess she was shut off from society and was going to be forced to marry the man who won the Cosmo knights Battle. Pan helps to smuggle Tara off-world and ruins her life on her backwater planet. When two strangers show up at her home needing help, her life is turned on its head. She leaves her planet behind and begins her real life in the stars. An incredible, original story about space, knights, princesses, and lost friends.

Dugan is one of my absolute favorite authors of queer YA, and this romance between out-and-proud track star Morgan and closeted Ruby is a perfect illustration why, merging a fun high school setting and passionate main characters with the very relevant situation of managing your public level of queerness. It’s thoughtful and sweet, romantic and funny, and above all, real. 

Have you ever searched for queer history only to find… yourself? This is Jenn Shapland’s story in her delightful biography-slash-memoir about the writer Carson McCullers. Shapland digs through McCullers’ letters, discovers the late writer’s therapy appointment notes, and even recounts her own experiences living in McCullers’ former home, looking for any shreds of evidence to confirm the famed writer’s queerness. In the process, Shapland discovers her own lesbianism. As a trans lesbian, I relate so vividly to Shapland’s experiences of rethinking her own identity in the process of doing queer history. I love how she interweaves her own life with McCullers’—a kind of transgenerational rejection of the closet and a celebration of queer womanhood.  

Anna Birch’s I Kissed Alice is an enemies-to-lovers story about two gifted artists, Rhodes and Iliana, at a school for the arts who despise each other in person but fall hard for each other’s online fanfiction personas. Rhodes’s depression and anxiety consume her in the race to win a prestigious scholarship and navigate a complicated dynamic with her alcoholic mother. I found Rhodes’s on-page therapy sessions incredibly refreshing and relatable, something I don’t see enough of in YA fiction. The characters in this story are unlikeable and flawed—extremely so—but for that reason, my heart clenched often at their actions, assumptions, and reactions. Bonus points for the beautiful fanfiction graphics illustrated by Victoria Ying.

Recently published and super accessible, this book is a modern catalogue of lesbian and bi culture for women. It looks at the recent evolution of queer female visibility in the mainstream and across pop culture, asking what material changes this visibility has for the life of queer women everywhere. It’s funny and pacey and broad in scope, as it asks: How is lesbian culture changing?

I try to limit the amount of physical books I purchase because my apartment is already overflowing with them. But there are some books so good, I need a copy of my own—The Weight of the Stars is one of those. Told in short, micro-fiction style chapters is the story of Ryann, a girl who dreams of traveling to space but doesn’t see a way out her trailer park on the “wrong” side of town. But then she meets Alexandria, a mysterious loner who is angry at the world because her own mother is an astronaut who volunteered for a one-way trip to the edge of the solar system. Lush and heartbreaking, this queer, big-hearted book cemented Ancrum as one of my must-read authors.

What’s more all-consuming than being in love with your best friend? An uncontrolled fire, maybe–or a few of them. This turbulent romance between two teenage girls is told in prose poetry, and like the best novels in verse, every carefully formatted word carries weight. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, and it dives into the (main) narrator’s mind so intimately you’ll forget you don’t even know her name.