Queer YA Spotlight: The Dos and Donuts of Love

Premise: Shireen is ecstatic when she gets to compete on the very first season of the Junior Irish Baking Show—she’ll get to show off her skills with desserts, it will mean a new wave of interest in her parents’ struggling donut shop, and one of the judges is her all-time favourite celebrity baker, Padma Bollywood. But this sweet news takes a bitter turn when Shireen realises she’s not only competing against her ex-girlfriend but a potential new crush.

Rainbow rep: a plus-sized Bangladeshi lesbian protagonist; her lesbian Taiwanese ex-girlfriend

Content considerations: grating day-to-day racism and fatphobia, including online harassment; discussion of racism in the media; entitled obnoxious white people; depictions of panic attacks

Adiba Jaigirdar’s rom-coms always end up on my Best Of book lists, but I’ve never given one its own dedicated post. I feel this needs to change, and what better way to bring this about than with her fluffiest and most sincere contemporary YA yet?

I’m in a Book! Introducing An Unexpected Party

At the end of October, An Unexpected Party, an anthology edited by Seth Malacari, was published and released into the world. The collection gathers nineteen short stories that fit three categories: they’re by emerging queer authors from Australia, they’ve got queer main characters, and they’re speculative fiction of some flavour. There’s stories of space vampires, haunted petrol stations, gender-affirming witchcraft, world-destroying plants, and incredibly mundane superpowers… and there’s a story written by me!

After so much theorising about queer YA and its inner workings, both in Australia and in various niches in the broader market, it’s very exciting to be making my creative debut in the field—contributing to this world, making my mark, and making a small but hopefully significant difference. But how did this happen? How does one go about getting published in a fantasy anthology? Well, I can’t give universal advice, but this is how I got here…

Queer YA Spotlight: The Spider and Her Demons

Premise: Zhi is just trying to be an ordinary teenager, balancing school with work at her aunt’s dumpling shop while hiding the extra eyes on her forehead, the fangs in her jaw, and the four extra legs that sprout from her lower back. When Zhi accidentally kills and eats a man (in self-defence, mind you—but he was delicious) in front of the most popular girl at school, Zhi thinks she’s done for. Instead, she finds herself entangled in a world of demons and witches, and in a very strange friendship with a very strange girl who might be the only person who understands her.

Rainbow rep: aro-ace protagonist, supernatural body horror elements with enormous gender dysphoria vibes

Content considerations: aforementioned supernatural body horror; bloody violence; strained family relationships and parental abuse; brief scene of Zhi nearly being sexually assaulted; characters experiencing racial microaggressions.

Back in August, I was lucky enough to meet author sydney khoo at a bookstore event in Canberra. While I am going to reference a couple of things they talked about and those things will influence some of my points, I promise this is going to be a genuine objective review of the novel and not just me gushing about how nice and how cool sydney khoo is for 1,000 words. Let’s go!

A Pile of YA Novels with Non-binary Protagonists (Part 2!)

For my PhD thesis—which was submitted in August 2022, resubmitted with revisions in May 2023, and officially wrapped up in July 2023—I studied the increasing presence of non-binary main characters in young adult fiction. With my graduation (funny hat and cape and all) coming up this month, it’s time for a long-delayed follow-up to my initial recommendation pile from last year! Here, we’ve got a variety of stories with heroes under the non-binary umbrella, from dark thrillers to soft magical adventures. This features some newer releases, too, as well as a “classic”.

Queer YA Spotlight: The Immeasurable Depth of You

Premise: When her mother misinterprets a blog post as a suicide note, Brynn is banned from using social media and sent to spend a summer “off the grid” with her dad among the mangroves and manatees of Florida. Brynn is dreading the lonely, hot months, but finds an unexpected companion in an enigmatic, funny, prickly girl named Skylar. But there’s something a little odd about Skylar: she’s always in the same yellow swimsuit, she’s strangely cold to the touch, and Brynn has never seen her outside the bayou…

Content considerations: mental illness, depression, and suicide; depictions of panic attacks; on-page anxiety spirals and intrusive thoughts; in-depth descriptions of terrible ways to die due to said on-page anxiety spirals; natural disasters

Rainbow rep: bisexual protagonist; non-binary best friend. Brynn has a crush on Skylar but this is not a romance.

This one’s a Triple Q: quiet, quirky, and queer. The Immeasurable Depth of You is not a romantic urban fantasy adventure a la Cemetery Boys nor is it an atmospheric, visceral horrorshow like She is a Haunting (which, funnily enough, was the novel I finished just before this one—absolutely amazing month for teen girls going to visit their dads and ending up surrounded by ghosts!). Instead, Maria Ingrande Mora’s ghost story is a very soft, grounded one that flows gently along through very localised, very personal stakes.

The PhDiaries, Part 2: Thesis Pieces

These blogs were originally posted to my Patreon across late 2022. They’re intended as insights into my own creative and research process, and advice for folks who might be interested in getting into Arts research themselves. Enjoy!

For a PhD, you need to be able to argue that your work is An Original Contribution to Knowledge. Now, what on earth does that mean, and how does that apply to a degree in the Arts? And where do you get an Original Idea for your Original Contribution?

Wonder Egg Priority and the (Missed) Opportunities of Trans Magic

Content warning: discussions of transphobia, dysphoria; brief mentions of self-mutilation and surgery

It’s a beautiful day in March, 2023. The morning air is crisp, shimmering in between summer and autumn. The sun’s rays melt through a low-lying mist, lighting the world in smudges of gold, as if on the edge of a dream.

It is two years since the anime season of Winter 2021, when a certain series called Wonder Egg Priority aired.

And I’m still thinking about it.

God damn it, I’m still thinking about it. C’mere. Get comfy. Can I get you a cup of tea?

Genre-savvy Protagonists in Queer YA Rom-coms

LGBTQIA+ characters (and their quests for love) are increasingly appearing in YA fiction, and more specifically in YA romantic comedies. The rom-com, particularly in its most mainstream and familiar Hollywood form, has long been rooted in heteronormativity, in so far as it rarely deviates from or offers any substantive variation of the boy-meets-girl model of romantic love. This is something that adolescent readers will surely be aware of. Likewise, many marginalised young adult protagonists are characterised by an awareness of these same conventions, thus placed by their authors in a metatextual conversation with the very genre they inhabit.

Read the full mini-article in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies!

Otherworldly Bodies: Non-human Non-binary Characters in YA Fiction

Originally presented at the Young Adult Studies Association online conference, November 2022.

Transcript: Hello YASA, wherever you are in the world! My name is Alex, and I’m recording today from Ngunnawal country. In this paper I’ll be presenting some work from my recently submitted doctoral thesis, which examined non-binary representation in YA through the lens of mythology-inspired fantasy. Specifically, today I’m going to talk about an issue that crops up when representing groups like non-binary people in fantasy, or other speculative fiction: the idea of the non-human non-binary character. This potentially dallies with a lot of negative conceptions, but I argue it’s also potentially a very playful space to explore gender identity outside of the confines of contemporary realism.

Queer YA Spotlight: Where You Left Us

Cinnamon Prince is running away from home.

Not properly, not for good—just literally running, along the scraggly stretch of beach below her family’s house.

The water is blue as far as her eyes can see, as much as her chest can hold when she breathes it in. She does this a lot—running. She likes her brain best when it’s almost quiet.

Halcyon House looms over her the whole run back, all white with a steep-gabled roof and rows of windows like empty eye sockets. Its faded face peers towards the edge of the cliff, casting soft shadows over the sand and sea. Cinnamon used to think that Halcyon stretched towards the ocean the way plants do the sun. Or as though determined to drown itself and everyone in it.

Premise: The Prince family has been notorious for generations, from rockstar dad Ian and his mental breakdown to great-aunt Sadie who “went mad” and mysteriously vanished in the ‘60s. Teenaged sisters Cinnamon and Scarlett have their own issues, and must confront the haphazard state of their family relationships when they all end up home for the summer holidays. When a storm cracks open a headstone in the family graveyard, questions left buried for half a century are suddenly brought back to the light. Is piecing together the Prince clan’s past the key to a more liveable future?

Rainbow rep: a bisexual protagonist (Cinnamon); an f/f romantic subplot (with another bisexual character, no less!); gay side characters/ensemble cast

Content considerations: depictions of panic attacks and anxiety; depression; anger issues; discussions of the stigma around mental health; brief discussions of suicide ideation

A queer gothic-ish mystery about the uncanny realities of returning to your childhood hometown… set on the Australian coast? This one was made for me!