Top Ten Tuesday – Top Ten LGBTQA+ Characters

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly blog event hosted by The Broke and Bookish. 

Today I’m going to a mixture of my favorite LGBTQA+ characters, and some characters that I desperately want to read about. Hope you all enjoy!

1. Of course on this list has to be Monty from The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue. It’s so hard to find books with bisexual males, but you guys this book is fucking amazing. Funny, well written, fantastic!

2. This list would be dismal without at least one mentioning of Saga by Brian K. Vaughan. The last few issues have been focusing more closely on the trans character Petrichor, and she’s quickly becoming one of my favorites.  She’s smart, badass and super sarcastic.

3. This book didn’t have a have a huge LGBTQA+ plot, it was more subplot, but I still loved it.  It’s about grief and moving on and friendships, and it’s really well written.

4. Weird Girl and What’s His Face was not only a great book about figuring out your attractions, but also was a great book for X-File lovers. 😀

5. I wrote a review of this book earlier this year, you can check it out here.  Despite not liking some of the religious themes, I still recommend this book and did enjoy reading it a lot.

6. This is a book I have not read yet, but I’d really like to! It has a bisexual main character so what more could I want? 😉

7. This book has an asexual main character! Plus also I’m a huge fan of Tolstoy.

8. If I Was Your Girl is a book I’ve been wanting to read for ages, but haven’t been able to get my hands on it yet. The main character is trans, and it sounds like a really well written story.

9. I enjoyed Adam’s first book, so when I heard he was publishing a second one I immediately put it on my list!

10.  And last but not least, I’ve been dying to read the to  read The Inexplicable Logic of My Life. I’ve enjoyed Saenz’s first book and I think this one will be just as great!

So there you go! That’s my list, let me know if you’ve read any of these books and enjoyed them. Also be sure to leave a link to your TTT and I’ll stop by your blog! 🙂

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Poison Study – By Maria V. Snyder

Goodreads Synopsis: About to be executed for murder, Yelena is offered an extraordinary reprieve. She’ll eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace—and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia.

And so Yelena chooses to become a food taster. But the chief of security, leaving nothing to chance, deliberately feeds her Butterfly’s Dust—and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison.

As Yelena tries to escape her new dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and Yelena develops magical powers she can’t control. Her life is threatened again and choices must be made. But this time the outcomes aren’t so clear…

Find on Goodreads and Amazon.

I had forgotten this book was on my TBR, and I am so glad I found it again!

Poison Study is a near perfect read, it has a sympathetic main character, a unique world and good plot twists.  Personally I wasn’t a fan of the romance, hence why I say nearly perfect, but I’ll get back to that later.

We are introduced to our main character, Yelena, while she’s in prison waiting to be hung for murder.  Valek, the chief of security offers her a reprieve, but only if she agrees to be come the food taster for the Commander.  She agrees and begins her new life. I really liked Yelena’s character. She’s smart, funny, and doesn’t have a hero complex. Unlike a lot of Fantasy heroes she isn’t set up as a chosen one, she’s simply a girl doing her best to survive.

Valek was an interesting character as well. I mistakenly thought he was much older for the first bit of the book, which honestly would have been more interesting. But as it was he was still well written.  He’s very smart and duty driven, and for most of the book didn’t let himself be distracted by anything else.  Like I said earlier, there is a romance subplot between Yelena and Valek. I honestly didn’t care for them as a couple, and didn’t think it added much to the story. But that’s just my personal preference. I also hate the scenes of women not being in their ”right mind” and wanting sex and then the man being all “chivalrous” and telling the woman the moment isn’t right. Like maybe having a sex drive isn’t a bad thing. Maybe letting a woman blow off some steam after some stressful times isn’t a bad thing either. That’s just me.

The world of the Poison Study is really well written. It was an interesting mix of fantasy and a sort of steampunk. Or at least that’s how it felt to me.  I liked the way the magic worked, and the magical candy was a very interesting subplot.

All in all I enjoyed this book, I read it in two days and I can’t wait to get my hands on the second book.  I gave it 4.5 stars on Goodreads.

The Predicteds – By Christine Seifert

Goodreads Synopsis: Daphne is the new girl in town and is having trouble fitting in. At least she has Jesse… sort of. He wants to be more than “just friends,” but there’s something he’s not telling her about his past. Something dangerous. When a female student is brutally attacked, police turn to PROFILE, a new program that can predict a student’s capacity for violent behavior, to solve the case. As the witch hunt ensues, Daphne is forced to question her feelings for Jesse—and what she will do if her first love turns out to be a killer. 

Find on Goodreads and Amazon.

While this story has an interesting premise, almost nothing else about it is interesting.

The Predicteds starts out with a school shooting, the writing was fine, the characters fine. And then we get past the first chapter and into the story and it goes downhill from there. Daphne is a cliche amongst a sea of cliches. From her mother who follows the troupe where she refuses to Daphne anything “for her own good”, to our main character herself who is whiny and stuck on a hot but dangerous guy, to the friends who are ditzy, clique-y and rude. Because of course our main character can be the only half way human female in the entire school.

Blah, mostly this book is just a waste of time. Of course Jesse doesn’t turn out to be the ”bad guy” in the end. Of course Daphne must be saved by him a million times, and yet at the mention of him having female friends other than her, she immediately starts doubting him and throwing tantrums.

I suppose the moral of the story was don’t judge people based on family, or based on what society thinks will happen to them.  But honestly the book bounced between being ridiculously preachy to forgetting it had a moral at all.

I gave it 1 star on Goodreads.

Patreon Post – September 17 – Progress

This post was originally written for my Patreon supporters. If you would like to get first looks at posts, upcoming stories, and first links to my work, please consider supporting me. Thanks!  

Today I reached 4000 words in Maybe Not Her! The draft is now at 62 pages and I’m very pleased with how it’s coming along. At this rate I’m hopeful that I’ll be done with the collection by the end of October. Then I’ll let it sit before I go back and start editing.

In other news I’ve finished with one editing project for Patchwork Press and it’s on to the next! This is other book is by an author I’ve previously worked with, and I really liked the book I edited, so I’m super excited to be working with her again.

Collecting Chaos is slow going, but I wrote an entire chapter this week and now I need to sit down and do some more plotting for the book. I’m just over the 8000 word mark, and at this rate it will be a couple months before I’m finished with it.

Eighth Grade Bites – By Heather Brewer

Goodreads Synopsis:  Thirteen-year-old Vladimir Tod really hates junior high. Bullies harass him, the principal is dogging him, and the girl he likes prefers his best friend. Oh, and Vlad has a secret: His mother was human, but his father was a vampire. With no idea of the extent of his powers, Vlad struggles daily with his blood cravings and his enlarged fangs. When a substitute teacher begins to question him a little too closely, Vlad worries that his cover is about to be blown. But then he faces a much bigger problem: He’s being hunted by a vampire killer.

Find on Goodreads and Amazon.

Sometimes I like to try and read middle grade books, just for a change in pace. This book has also been on my TBR since 2012.

As far as young adventure books go Eighth Grade Bites isn’t the worst, it’s just so massively cliche I fear even younger readers will be bored by it. We’ve seen all of these troupes before, in tv, in other books. They’re old and overused.

Vlad is a good kid who also happens to be a vampire, when suddenly at the beginning of eighth grade everything seems to be going wrong. A teachers mysteriously disappears and then the substitute seems to be intent on letting Vlad know in the creepiest of ways that he knows about vampires. The teacher eventually turns out to be his uncle, and Vlad turns out to be a chosen one. Go figure. He almost dies, he fights the big bad guy, and saves the day.

And there you have the entire story.  For younger readers this book could still be fun, I emphasis could.  Or maybe you’re just looking for a fun book that ends happily, this book could be for you.

I gave this book 2 stars on Goodreads.

Under The Never Sky – By Veronica Rossi

Goodreads Synopsis: Aria has lived her whole life in the protected dome of Reverie. Her entire world confined to its spaces, she’s never thought to dream of what lies beyond its doors. So when her mother goes missing, Aria knows her chances of surviving in the outer wasteland long enough to find her are slim.

Then Aria meets an outsider named Perry. He’s searching for someone too. He’s also wild – a savage – but might be her best hope at staying alive.

If they can survive, they are each other’s best hope for finding answers. 

Find on Goodreads and Amazon.

The cover is pretty, what can I say? I sometimes pick up books just because of the cover. 😀

Reading Under The Never Sky went about as well as you’d expect from the synopsis. It was a quick read, though I did end up skimming the last quarter of the book.  It’s the type of book that could have been pretty interesting, if the cliches hadn’t been used.
I enjoyed the world of this book, though I admit I was very confused by it as well. I never quite understood what had happened to the world, some sort of an apocalypse changed our world, but why or how? I’m not sure. Also now people have special abilities, but how that was possible I didn’t understand either.  There’s also a lot of unexplained technology used by the people in the domes.

As for the characters, they were pretty forgettable. Aria is a self-righteous brat as well as being super boring. I never cared for her, I didn’t care if she found her mother or not. Everything had to be about her and that got boring real fast. Perry has a lot of macho fights for power with his brother that were boring as hell. Then he got a little better once he was away from his brother and found Aria. He wasn’t as much of a dick as he could have been.

Overall the best thing about this book is the cover.  I ended up giving the book 2 stars on Goodreads.