Another Round of Audiobook Mini-Reviews

Posted on October 6, 2025 by Thistle

Sometimes in July, I ran out of time to blog. I had photos to edit, trips to go on, stories to write, cosplay to plan…etc. I had life with Rainstorm to enjoy. In August, we went on vacation to London, eventually ending up at IneffableCon, all of which I’ll talk about in future posts, one day. I got back to Texas in late August, and have spent the time since then basically busy with a million other things. Enough so that, as you’ve seen, I’ve hardly even had time for reading my normal fanfic stuff.

Since July, I’ve listened to six audiobooks – one while I was editing photos in Europe, all the rest in the six weeks since I’ve gotten home. Audiobooks are great for errands and chores! But they’ve stacked up, and I’ll never get back to full reviews of some of these, so I might as well do another roundup post…

The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths (read by Julie Maisey)
Honestly? I barely remember this story. I liked it a lot. I remember that. I put the sequel, which releases next year, immediately onto my TBR. But I remember very little about it. It was a comfort-listen, great to not have to get so deep into while I edited all the photos taken in Berlin and at Berlin Pride. I wish I’d written something down about it at the time. Might have to revisit before the next one releases. In any case, this is Griffiths doing typically-lovely Griffiths. Love her work!

The Boyfriend Subscription by Steven Salvatore (read by Ellis Evans and Kirt Graves)
I swear, half of gay romance these days is Aziracrow fanfic. This one was soooooo GO-coded. One protagonist is a rich man who has distanced himself from his family and who is scared of love. The other protagonist is a redheaded poor man who just lost everything, including his gardening store. Enter a fake-dating arrangement, and you have the perfect strangers-to-lovers AU. It was great. Loved every second of it. Also, weirdly, I enjoyed the narration, even though one reader (Evans) narrated The Nightmare Before Kissmas and I detested his narration there. Huh.

The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson (read by William DeMeritt)
Speaking of detested narration, this one was awful. Which was unfortunate, because this book is wonderful! Back when Sanderson released his four-secret-projects books, this was the one I most looked forward to. It was the last to release, in late 2023, and I was going to listen to the audiobook. It was the only audiobook that year that wasn’t read by Michael Kramer and/or Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. Given that the duo read most of the Cosmere novels, and they read the other secret projects (including a non-Cosmere novel), it would’ve made more sense for DeMeritt to read the non-Cosmere and for Kramer to read this one. But there you are. Anyway, I tried listening to this back in 2023, but couldn’t get past the narration. At the time, I was too busy writing and reading fanfic to read a physical book, so I put it off. And off. And off. Finally, late in Aug, I decided to just listen anyway. And I loved the book. Yet still hated the narration. Sigh.

Look Up, Handsome by Jack Strange (read by Laurie Kynaston)
Um, remember that whole thing about gay romance being Aziracrow fanfic? This one is even more so. One protagonist owns a bookshop. In Wales. Which he’s losing to a family member who cares more about “business” than kindness. The other is a famous writer who literally drives a Bentley and who rarely ventures back into town because of his family’s fall from grace. There’s a best friend who reads tarot and sees auras and makes predictions. There’s a TV presenter who is basically Jimbriel (no, I won’t explain further). There are lines in the book that are actual throwbacks to moments in Good Omens. If this book wasn’t originally a fanfic, or at least envisioned as one, I’ll eat my nonexistent hat. I devoured it. Not just for the fanfic aspects – the book was so cute and lovely and perfect.

Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner (read by Zim Avaltrades and Dana Varden)
Found this sapphic romance at random on a shelf at Half Price Books, and it was available on Libby from my library so I dove in. The good: This was a lovely story with interesting characters. The adhd and autism aspects were extraordinarily well-written. I was literally sending lines from the story to Rainstorm (who is audhd, while I’m autistic) that mirrored IRL conversations we’ve had. It was perfect. The bad: I don’t known if the smut was poorly written or if the two narrators were uncomfortable reading it, but one way or another, the smut parts read very wooden and cringey. Sigh. I’ve yet to experience sapphic smut that was actually hot, which is really fucking sad!

The Wasp Trap by Mark Edwards (read by John Hopkins and Anna Burnett)
This is my third read by Edwards, and I quite enjoyed 99% of it. A dinner party, secrets, murder, and throwbacks to the summer of ’99, when all the attendees of the dinner party worked on a dot-com project together at uni. It’s a story about psychopaths, full of a number of twists that I sometimes saw coming, sometimes not. Everything unravels slowly between present/past storytelling. Loved that. The 1% I didn’t like was the last bit of epilogue, done, as usual, for potential twist. It could have been left off without any impact to the story, and mostly just made me roll my eyes and make this face: 😒 As for the narration, I particularly enjoyed Hopkins’ reading. My only quibble was that the two narrators read at wildly different speeds, so I had to change my speed settings each time the audiobook swapped narrators.

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Fanfic Minis – Sept 2025

Posted on October 1, 2025 by Thistle

Hmmm. Well, I didn’t read much in fanfiction this month. Actually, other than a few one-shots that were under the 10k threshold that I use for writing up these minis, I only read WIPs and tradpub fic, mostly because I was focusing on 1) audiobooks as I walked, packed, ran errands, and did chores, and 2) German lessons. Oh, and 3) finishing a novel that I’ve been writing for a year now while simultaneously writing a new one…because that’s what I need to be doing with my time, sure… Anyway, there’s only one fanfic mini this month, and it barely counts. I’ll explain below. Heh.

The Trouble with HELL by beerok23. TBH, I didn’t really “read” this book in September. I read all but the last two chapters during the spring/summer. But I was reading together with Rainstorm, and we simply hadn’t gotten to the last two chapters yet. However, the sequel began releasing this month, so I had to hurry up and finish! This is a cute dueling-podcasters story written by a very dear friend, and I’m really excited to get to the sequel!

Yeeeeah that’s it. At some point I’ll get back to posting. I need to do another audiobook roundup of everything I’ve listened to in the last three months. And other posts. Low priority right now, though. Eventually, I’ll get to it. Shrug.

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Fanfic Minis – August 2025

Posted on September 2, 2025 by Thistle

Not a lot of reading generally in August. It was a very busy month, with two weeks in the UK with Rainstorm, including attending IneffableCon. Then there was a very sad goodbye, returning to Texas (😭), adjusting with jet lag and illness and all the rest. Blogging completely fell by the wayside, as did writing, reading, and anything other than the most immediate of things. Anyway, here are the two fics I read this month.

First: at the airport terminal by bearwonder. This short little fic is really cute. Speed-run relationship – a bit intense in terms of too much too quick, but I didn’t mind the suspension of disbelief too much.

Second: Social organization and adaptability in Xenoerpeton anthropoides: transference of social bonding habits and mate selection by Liquid_Lyrium. Heh – yes, that’s the full title. I loved this one. It’s absolutely nothing that I thought I would love, or that I thought I would ever read, and yet, I fell in love with it. The aziracrow duo is presented as a researcher (Az) and a merlotl (mer-axolotl) (Crowley) who become bonded when Az falls through a sinkhole and is trapped in a cave system for several weeks, getting progressively weaker as his supplies run out. This goes into a lot of details about zoology, ethics, tandem evolution, metamorphosis, intelligence, human-centric research, psychology, and moral dilemmas. Again, not something I ever thought I’d end up reading, but honestly this is the sort of book that could easily be dissected in a college course. It’s so well-researched and carefully written. Def my favorite of the month and high up on my list of faves for the year.

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Fanfic Minis – July 2025

Posted on August 1, 2025 by Thistle

Loads less reading this month re: living temporarily with my Rainstorm. Loads fewer posts, too, as I’ve been busy with a ton of mini weekend travel trips, processing photos, etc. It’s summer. It happens.

First: No Food in the Library by anna_sun. Someone recommended this one-shot on bluesky, and it was really cute. I would have liked to see it expanded past a short story length because I think a lot could have been there, but I also think the author captured the long-game flirting happening between the main characters very well.

Second: Angels on High by Santillatron. This was recommended by a friend who knew of Rainstorm’s bouldering enthusiasm (and me having just climbed a wall for the first time!). An accidental feud and mistaken identity story that leads from flirting to enemies to lovers, and very much captures both the spirit of bouldering as well as the spirit of both canon characters.

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Cologne Pride 2025

Posted on July 14, 2025 by Thistle

A year ago, my (then) good friend Rainstorm talked about going to Pride in Cologne, Germany by themself. I had never been to Germany, and I had barely gone to my first Pride event (Texas summers do not make for easy Pride festivals!!), so I popped out with the random idea that I should visit Rainstorm the next summer and attend Pride with them.

Back then, we weren’t dating or anything, just really close friends, and this wasn’t meant as a dating-type thing. The idea kinda stuck, as a means to have me visit them, see a new-to-me country, and celebrate Pride while it wasn’t 100+ degrees outside. Then other ideas came up – different trips, different events – that kinda took away the possibility of Cologne Pride. After all, I can’t go to Germany in late June/early July if I’m going to London for IneffableCon in August. That’s a LOT of transatlantic flying…

Then Rainstorm and I began dating.

Then I came to Germany in the winter to visit them.

Then we collectively decided that it might be nice to have me come to Germany in late June, then just stay until we went to London together in August. We’d have lots of time together, plus I could escape the Texas heat for a bit. I had the flights for London already booked and I had some gift cards for the airline… I called, and in the end, it only cost me like $50 to change the flight. Yay!

(Note: we’re both really glad we did, because my current circumstances mean that after my already-booked travel plans this year, I won’t be able to travel again for quite some time. So it’s nice that we have two months to spend with each other now.)

Cologne Pride, it turns out, is the largest Pride celebration in all of Europe. There was a bit of a heat wave when I first got to Germany – it was actually hotter here than in San Antonio, and there is no a/c here… Yeesh. But a cool front came through, and Pride weekend was beautiful.

We had a very busy weekend. First, we traveled out to the house of one of Rainstorm’s friends. She had a bunch of friends over for her birthday. About half of them spoke English, so that was nice, and she had two very big fluffy cats, so I was in heaven. (I miss my cats!) We stayed until the late evening, when we took a train back to Cologne and attended a FLINTA party at a club until something like 2am, when we trekked the hour back to where Rainstorm lives to crash before the parade the next day.

The weather could not have been more different than in Texas! It was chilly and rainy, and yet, the parade still drew out its largest crowd ever, in excess of 1.2 million attendees! We spent several hours watching the various displays before we abandoned the parade route for coffee and food. By the time we headed back to the train station – which was, notably, done up in rainbow lights! – the parade was still going strong.

The environment was so nice. Everyone in Pride getup, with various flags worn as capes or drawn on cheeks in paint, tons of costumes and fun outfits and great signs. About half of the signs I saw in the parade were in English, and when they weren’t, Rainstorm could translate for me. We got tons of great photos – though I didn’t bring the big camera, because RAIN – and generally enjoyed a really fun day.

Notably, we weren’t able to wear our original intended Pride outfits due to the weather, but we have another chance in a few weeks for Berlin Pride. I’m really excited to be able to attend two Pride parades this year!

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Tattoo Tour: Witchy Cat (8)

Posted on July 10, 2025 by Thistle

When I first went tattoo-crazy in 2023, I followed a bunch of artists on Insta. One of them was Devony from Thieves of Virtue. Her artwork was incredible and I was so intimidated about reaching out to her originally. But then she put up some pre-made designs, one of which was so absolutely perfect for me that I just had to do it!

This was my first very large tattoo and my first full-color tattoo. It’s also the point where I began to notice something wrong with my skin (more on this in a bit). We split the tattoo into two sessions: the outlining and black shading first, and then the color portion a few months later. The tattoo was done in Nov 2023 and Feb 2024.

Honestly, I wish I had a more updated photo, but this tattoo goes almost all the way up to my hip so it’s hard to get a photo (hence coloring-out part of that second photo – no one needs to see the outline of my ass!). Most of the tattooed portions that look orange in that second photo are actually yellow – they were just irritated immediately post-color. [ETA: I just took a photo, pulling my shorts up, so you can see what it looks like now (last photo below) – still absolutely frickin’ beautiful!]

This tattoo is on my outer left thigh, starting a couple inches above my knee and going to a couple inches below my hip. The tip of the hat was insanely painful to get tattooed! Otherwise, though, the first session wasn’t too bad. Unfortunately, it took a month to heal, and the whole area felt really bruised for weeks. Because I’d never had a tattoo that big before, I thought this was normal (and it might be!). It wasn’t infected or inflamed – it just felt bruised.

However, when I got the color put on, it hurt really badly, far more than most other color tattoos that I’ve gotten since then, as if the skin wasn’t entirely healed despite it being 2.5 months between sessions. I had tons of plasma leak, to the point where the second skin popped and the liquid flooded down my leg within hours (left). Several parts of the color ended up getting scabbed and textured in a weird way that worried me. Devony assured me this was normal for large color tattoos, and we scheduled for touchups a few months later. Those weird patches of textured skin lost most of the color and it had to be added back in.

There wasn’t as much plasma leak with the touchups, so the second skin stayed on this time. Unfortunately, the newly-inked sections started to itch and burn, and when they healed, the skin remained textured like it had been scarred. I worried that I was allergic to something that was in Devony’s ink (she buys it from a special company), because I hadn’t had this reaction with any other tattoo. I also worried that it was an allergy to colored ink generally, though later experiences with tattoos taught me otherwise. A year later, those few textures patches are still scarred, though it doesn’t affect the look of the tattoo.

This was only the beginning of the scarring issue. It took another 10 months or so to figure out that I’m allergic not to the ink but to the adhesive on the second skin. This is also why my back tattoo itched so much (for six months!!). I’ve had other tattoos end up scarred and textured in the last year because of the second skin issue, but that will be addressed in future posts! At least this one didn’t end up with too much adhesive-based inflammation because of the leaking issue above! I can only imagine what would have happened if the second skin had stayed on a long time when the color first went on!

Anyway, despite the issues and the pain, I adore this tattoo and I love Devony as an artist. She’s one of only two artists that I’ve gone back to multiple times. My gorgeous black cat ink is rarely visible beyond maybe his feet peeking out from the edge of my shorts, but I see him all the time. He’s one of my faves!

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Tattoo Tour: Starry Night Batty Bat (7)

Posted on July 7, 2025 by Thistle

For my seventh tattoo, I booked with a woman named Kristin who does fine line ink at Twisted Tattoo in San Antonio. (Notably, this is also where Keith, who did my Dead Cute tattoo, has his studio.) I’d wanted to get this tattoo done pre-Oct-2023-cruise, particularly because it would be visible on my hand even if I wore long sleeves. I was really looking for visible indicators of queerness as I was embracing my personal identity more and more. I know a tattoo doesn’t say much, but I also know that when I see people with lots of tattoos, I’m more inclined to trust them above other people. So.

I didn’t know exactly what I wanted when I started out. Mostly, I just wanted something easily visible and that would fit my personal style. I’d seen Kristin do a lot of little ephemeral dragons that I adored, and I had some ideas of willow leaves and moons and stars. I prefer bats to dragons, and so I sent a bunch of reference photos, including ones from tattoos that Kristin had done, and I let her put together a design for me.

She didn’t want to do the tattoo before I traveled. The healing time would not work well with travel ahead, and it might be difficult especially with the sun traveling through the Mediterranean. We instead scheduled for November after I got home.

So…finger tattoos HURT. And they fade really easily. I have a couple photos of the tattoo when it was first done (one pictured above), and then I have a couple from when it was touched up eight months later (left). Now, a year after the touchups, one of the finger tattoos is almost gone again, and of course some of the sharpness of the original tattoo has softened. That’s to be expected and it still looks absolutely lovely. Kristin did a phenomenal job!

Speaking of which, I’ve had more compliments about this tattoo than any of the others I’ve gotten, even other visible ones. I’m really hoping to one day do a full half-sleeve on that arm that will integrate this tattoo, or wrap around it and the infinity sign on the inner wrist!

Little notes: Tattoo ink interferes with heartrate watches like Apple Watch or Fitbits. I can’t get an accurate read from those kinds of watches anymore. Oh well. Also, I know one day I might need surgery on this wrist again, as the surgery from 2021 didn’t actually get the root of the ganglion cyst in there, and I’m really sad about that because I have a feeling it’s going to completely fuck up the artwork. Boo.

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Mediterranean Cruise 2023 + Tattoo Tour: Snake Arm (6)

Posted on July 4, 2025 by Thistle

This is another catch-up post. I’m going to try to do some of these as I spend two months in Europe! Since my partner is working during the day, I might as well split my time into different priorities – catch-up blogging being one!

Shortly before I took 18 months off blogging, I talked about signing up for my first solo cruise/trip. As the date approached, I got really nervous. I’d never traveled alone and I didn’t know how that would be navigating in a country with no language skills. I nearly canceled, but I held strong and went. I’m so glad that I did, because the trip ended up being life-changing. This all started when I met with a group of other solo cruisers the night before our ship sailed. We had set up the tapas dinner through a facebook group, and while my experience with big groups is that they rarely gel well, this one was just perfect. There was over a dozen of us, and meeting them meant that I already had a group of friends at the start of the trip. We all ended up in a WhatsApp group chat and many of us have stayed friends to this day.

Through the next week, I went all out. We started and ended in Barcelona, with stops in southern France, near Florence in Italy, Corsica, and Ibiza (below collage). Virgin Voyages was incredible – high energy, queer-forward, body-positive, no kids, great fun! Highlights of the trip include 1) jumping into the pool with everyone wearing formal evening wear on Scarlet Night; 2) the bet acrobatics show I’ve ever seen on a cruise (and which my group nearly ruined when one friend tried to stop one of the acrobats from participating, not knowing she was an acrobat – the performance was a fight she was going to break up, and my friend was trying to protect her, ha!); 3) actually wearing pajamas to pajama night; 4) getting a tattoo on board, because of course they have tattoo artists and piercers on board; and 5) finding so many people who accepted me as-is, which isn’t the norm in my life.

During the trip, I joked with J on a phone call home that everyone was hooking up, and he told me that I should do the same. Long story short, J and I hadn’t had a romantic-type relationship since 2014, and being mostly celibate for nine years was very difficult for me. I was just starting to come out of the box I’d put myself into in order to survive, and J thought perhaps it would be best if we branched into a poly/open type situation. I was able to accept this, and while I didn’t hook up on the trip, I did make out quite a bit with four different friends. Is that TMI? Meh. I don’t post here to be discreet.

Anyway, it was a cruise that taught me to embrace myself exactly the way I am. I felt so happy, even as I got more and more exhausted throughout as I’d stay up dancing until 2am and then wake up before 9am for shore excursions. Combine that with lots of alcohol and then catching covid toward the end of the trip (ha! consequences of all the kissing – we passed it around between us!), and I was soooooo tired by the time I got home.

A core group of this trip have remained friends to this day, as I said above, and a whole bunch of us are taking a reunion cruise together in October. We’re mostly traveling solo, but our rooms are lined up in a row by a single travel agent, so we can all have one long communal balcony. It’s going to be an amazing time.

As for the tattoo, the artist I chose is illytattoo, who is based in London. I had an inspo photo that was of a snake eating it’s own tail, except the tail had become a sword by the end, with some stars, moons, etc around the main image. The original was in black and gold, but my artist changed it to be a bit more her style and used black and red. It was one of the least painful tattoos I’ve ever gotten, and it still looks beautiful almost two years later. I love this thing and I would love to visit the artist again some time!

PS – Before I quit blogging in 2023, my hair was still long. I cut it short a week after I wrote my end post. The original intent was to keep it short for Halloween, because I went as Crowley that year (obviously!). But afterwards, I just kept it short. I’ve never liked myself in short hair before, but I’ve come to really love it, and especially now that I’m playing with fun colors and I have 18-currently tattoos, it really serves as a strong indicator of being queer. 🤷🏻

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Fanfic Minis – June 2025

Posted on July 1, 2025 by Thistle

I spent most of this month reading tradpub books as I tried to cull/read my physical TBR down to as few items as possible. Less to pack away! Here are the few fanfics I read in June.

First: I Only Have Eyes For You by Twilightcitysky. This is a post-S1 canon-compliant story that delves into the metaphysical idea of angels and demons, and how their forms interact with the human world if all miracles are removed. It was a very fast read, quite lovely, and every chapter was titled after a song from the 50s that was later sampled/quoted in a song from my favorite band, so I’ve had pleasant music flashbacks the entire time I’ve read!

Second: Of Fire and Falcons by CemeteryAngel725. This is a ren faire au where a falconer and fire-spinner connect first on a casual basis and then grow more attached, until they can finally find a way to be with each other despite their differing tour schedules. Really sweet story overall, with lots of kink (explicit, in good form, with proper etiquette) and lots of in-depth immersion into the setting (both of the circus/faire type and of the Catskills, where most of the story takes place) and into the artistry involved in their jobs. There’s apparently a sequel that I need to read!

Third: Overboard by Laura Shapiro. This short story (12k) explores life post-apocalypse-that-wasn’t, two ethereal beings living together quietly away from the business of heaven and hell, and yet still afraid to give in to what hasn’t been allowed. It’s a story of hunger and love and trust and communication. Very delightful.

Fourth: Welcome to the Elysian by anna_sun. This was a story I really wanted to like but was disappointed by. It was well put-together, but it was advertised as a haunted hotel story and the paranormal bits were too easily resolved (in a way that I generally feel disappointed in with these things). Oh well.

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a bunch of audio mini-reviews

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Thistle

I’ve done an absolutely shit job of keeping up with reviews since I came back to the blog. Though honestly, that’s only really been since my trip in April. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but I got home from the trip and suddenly found myself embroiled in a not-so-amicable divorce situation. No sympathy, please – this has been coming for 11 years now, and we were planning to split next summer anyway, but the suddenness and the nature of how he went about it has meant that the last two months have been a lot.

I decided to just do a few mini-reviews of the audiobooks I’ve read in those months. Technically, this also includes one I started last year and finished in January, but all the rest were from May and June. I don’t have the mental fortitude or attention span to write more than a few words about any of these, so this will have to do.

Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson (read by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading)
This is the fifth installment in the Stormlight Archive and I listened to it over like two months. I barely remember it, tbh. I don’t think I was really in the right headspace to read it. This is my favorite series ever, so I know I will have to revisit this sometime when I’m in the right mood for it.

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher (read by Eliza Foss and Jennifer Pickens)
In a world where magic is thought of as cheap illusions, a sorceress can get away with murder. Literally. It takes a willful daughter, a determined future sister-in-law, and a full cast of their friends to challenge the sorceress, and no one is safe. This is another one I’ll have to revisit someday. The story was interesting, but anything deeper than surface level went entirely over my head while I was all stress-muddled. Narration was okay – I liked one narrator more than the other, though I don’t know which was which.

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (read by Andrew Fallaize)
Second installment in the Shadow of the Leviathan series. I adored this one. I met Bennett some time ago (2018?) and he said he liked to disguise books under the wrong genre. Fantasy novel that looks like a thriller; heist story masquerading as a fantasy, etc. These books have been murder mysteries in the clothes of fantasies (or vice versa?), and I adore them. The narrator is awesome, too.

The Christmas Swap by Talia Samuels (read by Kim Bretton and Emma Fenney)
Sapphic romcom with a very typical premise: girl pretends to be a guy’s girlfriend for his family, falls in love with his sister. However, this one ended up going very deep into family issues, domestic violence, emotionally abusive/manipulative relationships, dementia, and adult existential crises. It was a lot heavier than I expected, which is generally something I consider a good thing, though atm it would have been nice to be pure fluff! Still, good story. The narrators were good too.

The Nightmare Before Kissmas by Sara Raasch (read by Ellis Evans)
Cute story about the heir of Christmas and the heir of Halloween (yes, actual magical folks) falling in love when they’re not technically allowed because of the duties they have to their families and holidays. It’s rather steamy in places and I love a gay romance. This one also included a bit of political intrigue and I think there’s going to be a second installment. On the bad side, the narrator drove me insane. I didn’t really like the pov character because of the way the audiobook was read. If I revisit this one, it’ll def not be on audio unless the narrator changes!

System Collapse by Martha Wells (read by Kevin Free)
I read all the Murderbot books ages ago, back in 2021 I think? Because I read them all back to back in a quick time period, I didn’t recall a lot of what happened in them. This one has been on my list for a few years, but I’ve avoided reading it because I felt like I needed to revisit the old ones first. Then the Murderbot tv show started, and that refreshed me enough that I could listen to this one with revisiting the others. I loved the narrator and I think I’d like to go back and reread these all via audio – maybe I’ll retain more that way!

The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes (read by Karla Serrato)
This one made me cry. I mean, come on – queer kids in a Catholic school/family forced to stay in the closet out of fear they’ll be kicked out of their home? Yeah. Add to that the Latinx culture (from Arizona, but close enough to what I grew up with in Texas to be very relatable), immigration issues, bigotry (of the race and sexuality kind), religious bs, and poverty, and it’s a whole recipe for tears. Excellent book. I didn’t realize until I was done that it’s by the same author as The Broposal. They’re quickly becoming one of my faves! The audio narrator did a great job, too, including the Spanish sections, which I really appreciated!

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