My friend and fellow author ’Nathan Burgoine has been offering up daily reading suggestions for Pride Month over on his blog, and he’s listed some real bangers so far, including Xeni by Rebekah Weatherspoon (bisexual fake marriage for the sake of an inheritance) and Soul’s Blood by Stephen Graham King (sci-fi found family). And this week, he gave a shout-out to one of my own:
From fame, we go to fate, and another YA book I loved where a kid finds himself in a very different sort of spotlight. If you’ve been around my blog for long, likely it will not surprise you I’m talking about Jeffrey Ricker’s The Unwanted. This one plays to my spec-fic loving heart, and features Jamie, who after a spectacularly bad day with bullies and school and just being done with it all, comes home to find his mother waiting for him.
Which, y’know, is kind of a big deal since his single-dad has told him his mother was dead. That’d be enough to deal with, but it turns out his mother is also an amazon—like, as in mythological amazon—which would be impossible to believe, if it weren’t for the freaking pegasus in the back yard she arrived on. She just didn’t bother being any part of his life because, well, he’s a boy.
But, by the way, Jaime’s fated to save her entire people, so would he mind coming along and doing that?
Yeah. Yeah he’d mind.
Go check out the rest of his post over here, and then be sure to check out his own YA novel, Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks, which features a randomly teleporting queer teen and does not disappoint.