Here are 100 books that The Unbalancing fans have personally recommended if you like
The Unbalancing.
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As a Gen X kid growing up in a very conservative place, I struggled with gender, not feeling like the girl I was supposed to be. I knew I wasn’t a boy, and that just led to uncertainty and perpetual emotional discomfort. When I first heard about the concept of nonbinary gender a few years ago, my mind was blown. I knew if I were young, I would have immediately come out as nonbinary. But as an older person, it felt weird and pointless. Writing and reading books about people struggling with gender gave me the courage to finally be true to myself, and acknowledge that I am agender.
I love stories about artists, and I loved the creativity of the whole idea behind this adult fantasy set against an Asian-inspired backdrop, where art is magic and can be used to make things happen in the physical world.
But even better is the fact that the main character—a skilled artist roped into working for a corrupt entity—is nonbinary, and this is nothing more than a mundane fact. It’s a clear reminder that gender is just one part of a person’s existence—and probably not the most important one.
Gyen Jebi isn't a fighter, or a subversive. They just want to paint.
One day they're jobless and desperate; the next, Jebi finds themself recruited by the Ministry of Armor to paint the mystical sigils that animate the occupying government's automaton soldiers.
But when Jebi discovers the depths of the Razanei government's horrifying crimes-and the awful source of the magical pigments they use-they find they can no longer stay out of politics.
What they can do is steal Arazi, the ministry's mighty dragon automaton, and find a way to fight...
As an author of young adult fantasy and science fiction, I’ve read many books that fall within that rubric. This list captures the most exciting young adult novels I’ve read over the past few years. All have aspects of storytelling and themes I strive to capture in my writing. One thing I love about the young adult genre is the characters go on an adventure full of excitement and danger. The adventure is a metaphor for growing up. So if reads chock-full of death-defying odds, mystery, wonder, and a sprinkling of romance are your jam, the books in this list are for you.
I was blown away by how good Victories Greater Than Death is. It reminds me of the original Star Trek with its optimism and inclusiveness. Charlie Jane Anders puts inclusiveness front and center with the sheer diversity of her characters in ethnic origin, neurodiversity, and LGBTQA+ identification. This is done brilliantly in a manner that is in your face, lighthearted, touching, and nuanced. All this is accomplished without sacrificing the yarn's sci-fi suave.
The protagonist is Tina, a teenage girl destined to transform into an alien superhero. Her story thrums with fantastical adventure while exploring questions of identity and purpose with gravitas.I explore similar themes in my writing and hope I handle them with the aplomb Charlie Jane Anders does.
“Just please, remember what I told you. Run. Don’t stop running for anything.”
Tina never worries about being 'ordinary'--she doesn't have to, since she's known practically forever that she's not just Tina Mains, average teenager and beloved daughter. She's also the keeper of an interplanetary rescue beacon, and one day soon, it's going to activate, and then her dreams of saving all the worlds and adventuring among the stars will finally be possible. Tina's legacy, after all, is intergalactic--she is the hidden clone of a famed alien hero, left on Earth disguised as a…
As a career and executive coach for the past 25+ years, I have been on a mission to help people develop more satisfying and meaningful connections to their careers. I am passionate about this because most people spend the better part of their adult lives at work, more time than they do with their families, sleeping, and other priorities. Yet many become unhappy in their work, losing themselves over decades, and get blinded by their financial and career success. It can seem unimaginable to find a way to a more fulfilling career. I am determined to show them the pathways of possibilities, no matter where they are in their lives.
The first thing I loved about the book was its title. I have seen first-hand how curiosity can be a powerful force in improving people’s lives and making a difference in the world. Having interviewed over 260 people who changed their careers to gain greater fulfillment and meaning in their lives, curiosity was the one common thread that guided them to take risks, walk through doubts, and make critical decisions.
I love Shigeoka’s D.I.V.E. framework: Detach–Intend–Value–Embrace. It gave me guidelines for deepening and expanding my own curiosity with prompts to spark my thinking and opportunities to question my assumptions, discover new things, and cast aside self-doubts to take action, regardless of the outcomes.
'A timely bridge for our divided world' - Adam Grant, bestselling author of Give and Take
Open your mind, heal your relationships, and connect across divides with this groundbreaking guide to deep curiosity from internationally-recognized curiosity expert, Scott Shigeoka.
At a time when tensions over race, religion, gender identity and more have fractured our lives and relationships, curiosity is the key to fostering connection, growth, and healing.
Seek will help you build the courage to be transformed by the people, places and experiences you encounter - unlocking deep curiosity, and strengthening this fundamental human skill.
Using Shigeoka's transformative four-step framework,…
Burne’s been hiding out in the forest since deserting the King’s Guard. Each time he tries to return to the village, he begins to panic. And then one day, he encounters a handsome stranger picking flowers and hides behind a tree instead of talking.
My newest YA novel, Home Field Advantage, is your typical cliché sports romance between a high school quarterback and aspiring cheer captain…except that they’re both girls. Sports is such a fascinating setting for queer YA to me, because it adds a whole extra social dynamic of being teammates and how that can work for or against you, depending on the culture and who you are. It’s also a great venue for subversion of gender norms, which is always welcome to me! And in general, I really just love protagonists who are really passionate about what they do. If they happen to be queer as well, that’s just a nice bonus!
River McIntyre is a swimmer; at least that’s one element of their identity that’s safely and publicly established. But when he ends up “swimming” in the wrong place—a shark tank—it kicks off a journey of self-discovery that will change them forever. It’s such a brilliant path, taking place over the course of years and through different IDs and realizations, and I love the way everything—including River’s chosen name—always comes back to the water.
An achingly honest and frequently hilarious coming-of-age novel about an Arab American trans swimmer fighting to keep their head above water in a landlocked Midwestern town.
River McIntyre has grown up down the street from Sea Planet, an infamous marine life theme park slowly going out of business in small-town Ohio. When a chance encounter with a happy, healthy queer person on the annual field trip lands River literally in the shark tank, they must admit the truth: they don't know who they are-only what they've been told to be. This sets off a wrenching journey of self-discovery, from internalized…
When I was growing up there were no trans characters in children’s books, and partly because I had no examples I could point to, it took me until my forties to express and claim my gender truth. Now that I am a happily transitioned author, activist, and elected official, I champion middle grade novels by and about gender non-conforming humans because I want today’s trans kids to see themselves in stories. I hope to empower them to lead their best authentic lives from the beginning. I also hope to teach an often uninformed and sometimes prejudiced world to accept gender non-conforming kids as the beautiful healthy humans they are.
I particularly like the dual narration in this 2021 debut, with two characters who challenge gender norms at different levels of intensity as they bond over a secret rescue dog. Daniel is a boy who feels all his emotions intensely, and who has been told over and over that he is too sensitive. Ash cycles through genders, feeling and expressing girl sometimes and boy other times. It’s so good to see a GNC character in a lead role. I also got a hoot out of the graphic elements, which are quirky and original.
*An Indie Next List Pick and a Top Ten Rainbow Book for Young Readers!*
Jules Machias explores identity, gender fluidity, and the power of friendship and acceptance in this dual-narrative story about two kids who join forces to save a dog . . . but wind up saving each other.
Ash is no stranger to feeling like an outcast. For someone who cycles through genders, it's a daily struggle to feel in control of how people perceive you. Some days Ash is undoubtedly girl, but other times, 100 percent guy. Daniel lacks control too-of his emotions. He's been told he's…
I was the little girl who always wanted to be at church, who felt compelled to tell people about the goodness of God, but because my religious communities did not allow women to be church leaders, I never imagined this was a path I could pursue. As an undergraduate, I was captured by the academic study of the Bible and could not imagine doing anything else with my life. Now, for the past 20+ years, I have been teaching the Bible in academic and ecclesial settings and have become one of many good scholars who are making a case that the Christian God fully values men and women.
No other book has helped me understand the categories of sex and gender and given me the language to define them. Even more important, that clarity has given me the confidence to affirm the goodness of different created bodies and allow the beautiful variety in which those bodies serve God’s kingdom.
In recent years, the issue of gender has become a topic of great importance and has generated discussion from the kitchen table to the academy. It is an issue that churches and Christian educational institutions are grappling with as well, since gender is a crucial aspect of identity, affecting how we engage socially and understand our embodiment. Upstream from all these conversations lies a more basic question: What is gender?
In Gender as Love, Fellipe do Vale takes a theological approach to understanding gender, employing both biblical exegesis and historical theology and emphasizing the role human love plays in shaping…
Lena thinks she knows her future: in her small village, nothing much has changed for two hundred years. Women farm and fish, plant and harvest: a cooperative, productive, peaceful life. Until the day a soldier rides in, to ask the unthinkable of the women: learn to fight. Invasion is imminent,…
I grew up playing video games from a classic Atari onward. And, if I could go back and tell my younger self his job would be to travel around the world talking, writing, and teaching about video games he never would have believed me. But, if he did, he’d be really excited about what was coming for him. I am consistently both shocked and thrilled that I get to do this as a job, and my favorite bit is often the teaching and communicating about games. It’s a blast!
I always love finding work that challenges how I see things and shifts my perspective in some way. This is one of those books!
Even better, whenever I teach a group about this book and the arguments it makes about games a handful of people have a deep transformation about their understanding of games.
Reading this book will shake up how you think about video games, what they do, and how they work. And you might be in that group of people who can’t stop seeing the world in a different way because of your new perspective!
Argues for the queer potential of video games
While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can-and should-be read queerly.
In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive…
After more than 20 years of community work and activism in LGBTQ+ spaces, I couldn’t help but turn these experiences into a novel in which Berlin becomes the world’s first gay state – Proud Pink Sky,released March 14 from Amble Press. My essays and short stories focus on the strange, the queer, and the speculative, and have been published in The Sun Magazine, Guernica, Strange Horizons, PinkNews,andNature Futures,while my campaign work for LGBTQ+ and polyamory rights has been referenced in The Mirror, Buzzfeed, and BBC News. I am also nonbinary queer, have a Ph.D. in Literature, and currently live in Berlin.
Melissa Scott takes worldbuilding to fascinating extremes in her 1995 novel, Shadow Man. Due to changes in human biology, there are five recognised sexes in Scott’s far-flung society, with man and woman joined by fem, herm, and mem – yet despite the variety in body types, the isolated and backward planet of Hara forces its residents to choose between a simple binary. With its bold depictions of gender discrimination and violence, Shadow Manis relevant to our own social battles while also indulging in a fast-paced plot and thought-provoking speculation, all while being just different enough from our own world that it scratches that escapist itch.
In the far future, human culture has developed five distinctive genders due to the effects of a drug easing sickness from faster-than-light travel. But on the planet Hara, where society is increasingly instability, caught between hard-liner traditions and the realities of life, only male and female genders are legal, and the "odd-bodied" population are forced to pass as one or the other. Warreven Stiller, a lawyer and an intersexed person, is an advocate for those who have violated Haran taboos. When Hara regains contact with the Concord worlds, Warreven finds a larger role in breaking the long-standing role society has…
Queer community means what we make it mean—but in the end, we mostly have each other, with our varied histories and problems and capacity to care for our peers and harm them. Intergenerational community is a model for young people that the problems they’re facing aren’t new. I grew up in LGBT youth groups, in a generational moment just before gay marriage, PrEP, and increased access to healthcare for trans people transformed our sense of what “activism” and “solidarity” meant. As the political pendulum swings in the other direction, I think some of the best stories we can tell are ones where we aren’t individuals or couples in our own narrative bubbles.
I don’t know if most librarians would understand or shelve this as YA, but Lowrey’s cast of eighteen-year-old trans punks and squatters have more in common with most trans kids, in 2006 or the present day, than many YA-marketed idyllic stories about teens with accepting families and limited substance use issues.
From nonprofits where suburban children pick fights with homeless teens to squats where young punks pressure each other into conforming to their own specific dysfunctional microculture in Portland, Oregon, this book resonates for me as tracking a moment in history—the youth of all the trans people who were in their twenties when I came out in my early teens, and were trying to devote themselves to the same community projects they had benefited from when they were runaways and train-hoppers.
Click, a straight-edge transgender kid, is searching for hir place within a pack of newly sober gender rebels in the dilapidated punk houses of Portland, Oregon circa 2002. Ze embarks on a dizzying whirlwind of leather, sex, hormones, house parties, and protests until hir gender fluidity takes an unexpected turn and the pack is sent reeling.
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band, they rob the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive pegasus. Thanks to Marani’s mysterious invulnerability,…
I’ve been passionate about science as a way of learning how nature works and approaching truth since I was a pre-teen. After five decades of basic research, teaching, and management in physics, I can distinguish good science from pseudoscience even beyond my own areas of expertise. I am greatly disturbed by attempts to undermine science in public policy-making when its findings conflict with ideology, religious beliefs, or business bottom lines. My passion project, via my blog debunkingdenial.com, is to explain to teachers and the public the underlying science and the flaws in science denial across a wide range of topics at the interface with public policy.
I love this book because the author debunks myths about sex and gender promulgated by both the political left and the political right. Soh surveys recent biological research on brain and fetal development that demonstrates that sex and gender identity are not identical; they are distinct biological traits developed at different stages of pregnancy. Sex is determined by reproductive organs normally formed within the first trimester.
At the same time, gender identity resides in the brain, whose development is influenced not only by chromosomes but also by exposure to hormones during the second trimester and all the way up to birth. Male and female brains are wired differently. Gender is not simply a “social construct,” as many social scientists claim. My understanding of many issues relevant to the contentious politics regarding gender and transgender rights has been influenced by this book.
International sex researcher, neuroscientist, and columnist Debra Soh debunks popular gender myths in this scientific examination of the many facets of gender identity that "is not only eminently reasonable and beautifully-written, it is brave and vital" (Ben Shapiro, #1 New York Times bestselling author).
Is our gender something we're born with, or are we conditioned by society? In The End of Gender, neuroscientist and sexologist Dr. Debra Soh uses a research-based approach to address this hot-button topic, unmasking popular misconceptions about the nature vs. nurture debate and exploring what it means to be a woman or a man in today's…
