Book Recommendations: Pride Month Edition – 12 Books with Sapphic and F/F Rep to Read During Pride Month!

Pride Month is a month-long event at The Quiet Pond, where during the month of June, queer authors and bookish content creators are invited to celebrate being queer, queer books, and their experiences of being a queer reader. Find the introduction post for Pride Month at The Quiet Pond here.

One of my favourite parts about these month-long celebratory events at the Pond is that I get to inundate all of you with book recommendations. And what better month than Pride Month?

For us at the Pond, Pride Month is an opportunity to spotlight and celebrate the incredible work done by queer authors. Moreover, it’s important to us that the work that we do when celebrating Pride Month is deserving of the intersectional Pride Month flag that we have proudly used in our banner. Therefore, the books that we recommend will include books by authors of colour and disabled authors – and we encourage all of our Pond friends to make their Pride reading intersectional and colourful. 🌈

Book Review: Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers – A Must-Read, Unrelentingly Authentic and Lyrical Novel

Blurb:

With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.

This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father’s plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn’t feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her parent’s expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.

In New York, she’s able to ignore all the constant questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she’s been running from all along—the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.

Honey Girl is one of the most impeccable books I have ever read. In the span of less than 300 pages (293 to be exact), Morgan Rogers covers a massive breadth of experiences in the life of Dr. Grace Porter, a recent PhD graduate in astronomy navigating the job industry post-graduation. Grace finds herself adrift in a world that has systemically barricaded her from an equitable chance at jobs that she is more than qualified for and she finds herself lonely and defeated. The book opens with her waking up, having married a woman she hardly knows in Vegas, and the blurb on the dust jacket led me to believe that this would be a fun pre-destined marriage contemporary novel, but in these pages lay one of the most magnificent coming of age stories.