A heart-warming, queer rom-com about first love and identity that utilizes a beloved romance trope: faking dating!
HANI AND ISHU’S GUIDE TO FAKE DATING
by Adiba Jaigirdar
Page Street Publishing/St. Martin’s Press, May 2021
Everyone likes Hani Kahn—she’s easy going and one of the most popular girls at school. But when she comes out to her friends as bisexual, they invalidate her identity, saying she can’t be bi if she’s only dated guys. Panicked, Hani blurts out that she’s in a relationship…with a girl her friends absolutely hate—Ishita Dey. Ishita is the complete opposite of Hani. She’s an academic overachiever who hopes that becoming head girl will set her on the right track for college. But Ishita agrees to help Hani, if Hani will help her become more popular so that she stands a chance of being elected head girl. Despite their mutually beneficial pact, they start developing real feelings for each other. But relationships are complicated, and some people will do anything to stop two Bengali girls from achieving happily ever after.
Adiba Jaigirdar is a Bangladeshi and Irish writer and teacher and the author of The Henna Wars, which Kirkus called “impossible to put down.” She is also a contributor for Book Riot. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.
Seventeen-year-old Dare Chase is the star of a popular ghost-hunting YouTube channel—or she was, until her boyfriend and channel co-creator dumps her right after junior year. Dare’s determined to prove she can find success on her own, and thanks to a tip from a fan, she knows just where to start: the Arrington Estate. Arrington is known for its dark past, notably the mysterious death of Atheleen Bell, a teenager who drowned in the lake thirty years prior—and whose body was inexplicably skeletal when it was recovered only hours after her death. Along with the rumors of ghosts on the premises, this is the perfect subject for Dare’s new paranormal investigative podcast. Dare herself doesn’t believe in ghosts, but she can’t shake the feeling that there’s something more to Atheleen’s death, so she accepts an internship working to turn the old house into a museum. As she digs deeper into the mystery with the help of Quinn, the new homeowner’s daughter, and as her podcast gets more popular, it becomes clear that someone—or something—doesn’t want Dare getting too close to the truth. Soon, Dare will have to reckon with the possibility that ghosts could be more real than she thinks. Because there’s something lurking in the lake…and it hasn’t finished with her yet.
That’s what Jess was to me. I was the ground; she was the rain. I wasn’t anything until she woke me up.
Raquel Willis is a powerful woman. But growing up as a young boy in the South made being herself almost impossible. In this moving and provocative memoir, Raquel relives the many risks she faced in her struggle to become a fierce advocate for her community—and the powerful woman—that she is today. Today, she is known as a transgender trailblazer, both for work with the Transgender Law Center and speaker at the National Women’s March. She offers intimate reflections on masculinity and blackness, informed by a tumultuous relationship with her father. From a childhood built in opposition to expectations, all the way through her transition at a flagship Southern university, Raquel demonstrates that her story is but one thread in the larger tapestry of Black trans American life; a tapestry that has never truly been chronicled from this millennial, Southern perspective.
FLUNG OUT OF SPACE is an imagined portrait of the wild and complicated figure that was infamous crime writer Patricia Highsmith. As the story opens, we meet Pat begrudgingly writing low-brow comics. A drinker, a smoker, and a hater of life, Pat knows she can do better. Her brain churns with images of the great novel she could and should be writing—what will eventually be