Here are 100 books that Crushing It fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m an accidental sports writer. While I played a few sports as a child and went as Sporty Spice for one ill-advised Halloween, I didn’t grow up on a steady diet of sports stories. I just didn’t get it. Sure, I heard stories of triumphant soccer seasons and rag-tag baseball teams, but they didn’t capture my interest. But then I grew up… and books became more diverse. I started revisiting sports novels after writing my debut novel. Seeing authors use sports as a way to explore queerness has changed my understanding of sports stories and given me a new appreciation for the genre. I can’t get enough!
This was the first published book I read with a nonbinary main character. That alone makes it one of the most personally important books I have ever read. The fact that I encountered it just after writing my own novel about a nonbinary figure skater made this beautiful book hit even harder.
It showed me that even though two books may have the same hook and some of the same basic ingredients, the execution can be diverse and take those ingredients in directions you never expected. It sparkles, both in its descriptions of figure skating and in its nuanced and honest exploration of identity. It also makes for an excellent read-aloud book.
Twelve-year-old Ana-Marie Jin, the reigning US Juvenile figure skating champion, is not a frilly dress kind of kid. So, when Ana learns that next season's program will be princess themed, doubt forms fast. Still, Ana tries to focus on training and putting together a stellar routine worthy of national success.
Once Ana meets Hayden, a transgender boy new to the rink, thoughts about the princess program and gender identity begin to take center stage. And when Hayden mistakes Ana for a boy, Ana doesn't correct him and finds comfort in this boyish identity when he's around. As their friendship develops,…
Mal's older brother has disappeared into thin air. Laura's parents went away for the weekend and when she gives them a call, they have no idea who she is. In pursuit of answers, the teens become entangled with two others similarly targeted by a force they don't understand and now,…
I’m an accidental sports writer. While I played a few sports as a child and went as Sporty Spice for one ill-advised Halloween, I didn’t grow up on a steady diet of sports stories. I just didn’t get it. Sure, I heard stories of triumphant soccer seasons and rag-tag baseball teams, but they didn’t capture my interest. But then I grew up… and books became more diverse. I started revisiting sports novels after writing my debut novel. Seeing authors use sports as a way to explore queerness has changed my understanding of sports stories and given me a new appreciation for the genre. I can’t get enough!
I will never get sick of hearing people’s roller derby names. I absolutely flew through this book. I mean, as sports go, roller derby has gotta be one of the coolest! The first in this series follows Dynamic Duo Kenzie (aka Kenzilla) and Shelly (aka Bomb Shell) as they round out their derby team. They both have big expectations for how everything will come together, but, of course, getting more girls involved in a duo leads to new, thorny dynamics.
I particularly love the ensemble cast of this book as it builds for the series to follow. Derby Daredevils also comes with a lot of great interior illustrations throughout the story—it’s not quite a graphic novel, but it scratches that itch.
A highly illustrated middle-grade series that celebrates new friendships, first crushes, and getting out of your comfort zone
Ever since they can remember, fifth-graders Kenzie (aka Kenzilla) and Shelly (aka Bomb Shell) have dreamed of becoming roller derby superstars. When Austin's city league introduces a brand-new junior league, the dynamic duo celebrates! But they'll need to try out as a five-person team. Kenzie and Shelly have just one week to convince three other girls that roller derby is the coolest thing on wheels. But Kenzie starts to have second thoughts when Shelly starts acting like everyone's best friend . .…
I’m an accidental sports writer. While I played a few sports as a child and went as Sporty Spice for one ill-advised Halloween, I didn’t grow up on a steady diet of sports stories. I just didn’t get it. Sure, I heard stories of triumphant soccer seasons and rag-tag baseball teams, but they didn’t capture my interest. But then I grew up… and books became more diverse. I started revisiting sports novels after writing my debut novel. Seeing authors use sports as a way to explore queerness has changed my understanding of sports stories and given me a new appreciation for the genre. I can’t get enough!
Heartwarming sports movies never really got me when I was growing up… until I read this book. Now, I understand. Getting to hear Obie’s inner monologue—full of humor and heart—as he navigates the sport of swimming as a transgender boy is exhilarating… and, at times, challenging because of the bullying and transphobia Obie faces. Those challenges are tempered by a beautiful support system and a rallying insistence throughout the book that trans youth are both powerful and needed.
Like all good sports movies, this has all the emotional heft you could want. Pro Tip: Snag this one on audiobook to hear author Schuyler Bailar thread even more voice into Obie.
A coming-of-age story about transgender tween Obie, who didn't think being himself would cause such a splash. For fans of Alex Gino's George and Lisa Bunker's Felix Yz.
Obie knew his transition would have ripple effects. He has to leave his swim coach, his pool, and his best friends. But it’s time for Obie to find where he truly belongs.
As Obie dives into a new team, though, things are strange. Obie always felt at home in the water, but now he can’t get his old coach out of his head. Even worse are the bullies that wait in the…
The summer holidays have finally arrived and Scout can’t wait for her adventure in the big rig with Dad. They’re on a mission to deliver donations of dog food to animal rescue shelters right across the state. There’ll be dad-jokes, rock-collecting, and a brilliant plan that will make sure everyone’s…
I’m an accidental sports writer. While I played a few sports as a child and went as Sporty Spice for one ill-advised Halloween, I didn’t grow up on a steady diet of sports stories. I just didn’t get it. Sure, I heard stories of triumphant soccer seasons and rag-tag baseball teams, but they didn’t capture my interest. But then I grew up… and books became more diverse. I started revisiting sports novels after writing my debut novel. Seeing authors use sports as a way to explore queerness has changed my understanding of sports stories and given me a new appreciation for the genre. I can’t get enough!
This is one of those books that bends time. It opens a conversation between the here and now of baseball-loving, closeted Silas’s life and 1977 when gay baseball player Glenn Burke invented the high five—a conversation that is absolutely absorbing.
This book surprised me in the best way. It crackled off the page and was a deeply enjoyable read while also sparking important conversations around the stories we choose to tell, how we create community, and what it means to share our true selves with the people around us. This is one of those books that makes me feel cared for as a reader.
When Silas Walker does a school presentation on former Major League Baseball player Glenn Burke, it's more than a report on the inventor of the high five. Burke was a black gay baseball player in the '70s - and for Silas, the presentation is his own first baby step toward coming out as gay. Soon he tells his best friend Zoey, but the longer he keeps his secret from his baseball teammates, the more he suspects that they know something's up. Kids get pulled from the team, fingers point at Silas, and he stages one big cover-up with terrible consequences.…
When I was growing up, there were no stories for me. A queer kid in a very conservative Catholic household, I knew I was different, but I had no way to articulate that difference, and no way to imagine a horizon of happiness, of dignity, or of joy. In the worlds people imagined for young people, we were simply written out. I have since spent a lifetime studying and telling stories – as an English professor, as a bartender at a queer bookstore and drag bar, and now as a writer. And what matters to me most is seeing queer lives lived in abundance. These are the stories I wish I had.
A rough-and-tumble gaggle of middle-schoolers on the C-string girl's soccer team navigate first crushes, coming out, queer identity, and relationships – and being really, really bad at soccer. Johnson’s perfect ear for tween voices is matched by a frenetic art style that pops with crisp energy and a delirious, bouncy pace that rebounds around its panoply ofLeague Of Their Own-esque characters like a soccer ball zig-zagging across its field. All the cheers, all the skinned knees, all the dizzying emotions and close friendships of the tween years come rushing back.
Faith, an introverted fifth grader with a vivid imagination, starts middle school worrying about how she will fit in. To her surprise, Amanda, a popular eighth grader, convinces her to join the school soccer team, the Bloodhounds. Having never played soccer in her life, Faith ends up on the C team, a ragtag group with a tendency for drama over teamwork. Despite their losing streak, Faith and her fellow teammates form strong bonds both on and off the soccer field, which challenge their notions of loyalty, identity, friendship, and unity.
The Breakaways is a positive exploration of the complexity of…
Growing up in an eccentric, liberal family, as a member of the Church of England, under the shadow of the British Government’s homophobic Section 28, the messages I received were distinctly mixed. If I’d heard the word ‘bisexual’ before the age of twenty my life might have been very different. And to this day, the most common assumption is that one can’t be simultaneously queer and Christian. As I’ve discovered, and as these books show, that isn’t true – and moving beyond that assumption reveals new and fascinating horizons.
If ever there was a book that felt like it had been written just for me, this is it. Set in a fictional European country in the early nineteenth century, it has swashbuckling, nights at the opera, complicated family history, politics, magic, and lesbians. The way that Christianity is integrated into the fantastic element won’t be for everybody, but I was won over by Margerit’s earnest insistence on claiming her identity as a queer woman of faith and power. I’d wholeheartedly recommend the rest of the series, too.
Margerit Sovitre did not expect to inherit Baron Saveze’s fortunes—even less his bodyguard, a ruthlessly efficient swordswoman known only as Barbara. Wealth suddenly makes Margerit a highly eligible heiress and buys her the enmity of the new Baron. He had expected to inherit all, and now eyes her fortune with open envy.
Barbara proudly served as the old Baron’s duelist but she had expected his death to make her a free woman. Bitterness turns to determination when she finds herself the only force that stands between Margerit and the new Baron’s greed.
At first Margerit protests the need for Barbara’s…
Eleven-year-old Sierra just wants a normal life. After her military mother returns from the war overseas, the two hop from home to homelessness while Sierra tries to help her mom through the throes of PTSD.
If society considered your desires illegal, would you save records of it? As a historian of sexuality in the US and as a queer person, I’m drawn to stories about convention-defying love. We know much more about straight people’s passions because these were the socially approved ones. Learning about queer people’s desires is more challenging—and the result feels even more precious.
I wanted to listen to Blues music all day after reading Woolner’s enlightening tour of queer Black women’s loves and lusts in the early 20th century United States. From fights that erupted in lesbian love triangles to affairs among Blues performers and their fans, Woolner keeps the story humming.
The book convinced me that “lady lovers,” as Black Americans called queer women at the time, created a vibrant world of desire, friendship, and love.
Black queer women have shaped American culture since long before the era of gay liberation. Decades prior to the Stonewall Uprising, in the 1920s and 1930s, Black "lady lovers"-as women who loved women were then called-crafted a queer world. In the cabarets, rent parties, speakeasies, literary salons, and universities of the Jazz Age and Great Depression, communities of Black lady lovers grew, and queer flirtations flourished. Cookie Woolner here uncovers the intimate lives of performers, writers, and educators such as Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Gladys Bentley, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Lucy Diggs Slowe, along with the many everyday women she encountered…
I am a writer and performer born and raised in New York City. In my previous life, I was an Emmy-nominated journalist and digital media producer, covering sexual and reproductive health. In addition to writing, I love musical improv, opera, Olympic weightlifting, and spending time with my wife and dog.
What most people fail to appreciate is that each new tentacle is another location for a little kiss. Vesper Rune, a warm-hearted eldritch horror, has tentacles, and, as librarian Sebastian Rath can attest, each could do with at least one little kiss.
Jordan L Hawk, author of the popular Whyborne and Griffin series, is a titan in the world of kissable monstrosities, and the cultist-turned-hero Vesper Rune is possibly my favorite. After a lifetime of hiding, he finally finds a place where he can be safe, open about both his queerness and his untraditional anatomy, and receive many little kisses. Widdershins knows its own.
Growing up in an eccentric, liberal family, as a member of the Church of England, under the shadow of the British Government’s homophobic Section 28, the messages I received were distinctly mixed. If I’d heard the word ‘bisexual’ before the age of twenty my life might have been very different. And to this day, the most common assumption is that one can’t be simultaneously queer and Christian. As I’ve discovered, and as these books show, that isn’t true – and moving beyond that assumption reveals new and fascinating horizons.
I’ve never read a book quite like this, and yet it felt hauntingly familiar. The population of Earth is rescued en masse from a destructive solar event and has to start again from scratch on an unknown planet. But of course humanity has taken the problems of its own nature with it, and the encounter with its new hosts only raises further questions – around sex, gender, love, and nature. It’s brave and beautiful, hopeful and sad and dynamic all at once, and it kept me reading and guessing all the way to the end.
In the year 2035 humanity is rescued from a lethal solar flare by seven mysterious beings and transported across the universe to the uninhabited planet of Ansar. Earth's major cities are recreated, and a stunned but thankful humanity mostly carries on with life and society. But is everything as it appears? Just who are the semi-omniscient beings who rescued them? What do they really want? And to what secret place do they retreat every night? With that appearance of the seven, all the old divisions concerning gender, privilege, and power re-emerge in unexpected and increasingly dangerous ways. Conspiracy theories abound.…
Zeni lives in the Flint Hills of Southeast Kansas. This tale begins with her dream of befriending a miniature zebu calf coming true and follows Zeni as she works to befriend Zara. Enjoy full-color illustrations and a story filled with whimsy and plenty of opportunity for discussions around the perspectives…
Megan is a long-time resident of queer fantasy romance and keeps herself busy reading and writing it. She has been doing so for nearly twenty years, and hopes to do it at least another twenty. She is asexual, biromantic, and married to a wonderful woman. When she’s not busy writing, she likes to cook, harass her wife and cats, or watch movies and play video games.
This is one of the best books of redemption I've ever read, about a man who did some truly horrible, some would say unforgivable things, and has been working hard the past several years to make amends for his wrongs, a journey he continues even as he meets the man who just might be the love of his life. All this in a beautifully built fantasy world, and while it is book two in the series it stands on its own just fine. When it comes to tales of redemption and forgiveness, though, of facing a sordid past and working to overcome it, this book continues to set the bar for me.
On the outside, Mayr seems to have it all: a successful career as Head of the Guard for a prominent politician, family and friends who rely on him, and the attention of beautiful lovers. But appearances are a good way to bury secrets, including mistakes he can never fix and a broken heart that never seems to heal, forever searching for the one person to share his life with.When his last girlfriend takes him back and suggests an intimate night together with Tash, one of her lovers, Mayr reluctantly agrees. The last thing he expects is to fall hard for…
