76 Books Like Sketchtasy

Like a hipster Brooklyn transgender Sex and the City, this novel is a chatty, hilarious, and moving look at queer folks grasping for parenthood and family in a world where all the rules have been thrown out.

The book’s narrator, transwoman Reese, takes us on this ride with such sardonic, poignant insight about the world she lives in that we begin to feel like we live in it, too. When Reese’s ex, Ames—who has detransitioned from his former transwoman identity, Amy—gets his straight female boss pregnant, the three of them begin negotiating how they might raise the child together.

But the novel’s true power lies in how Reese explains her life and her friends to us—bravely refusing to portray trans people as angelic role models and instead offering something deeper and more endearing: showing them as real people.

From the moment I met Carlotta Mercedes, the main character in this book, I was rooting for her. She’s a convicted felon, up for parole for the fifth time, but she’s pretty sure she’ll be denied: “Them sonofabitches said I had bad behavior, but they definition a bad behavior’s if you scream when a CO whupping yo ass like a Betty Crocker fudge cake.” I’m a sucker for books with lively, laugh-out-loud language. 

Carlotta is all dynamic energy and jambalaya metaphor, even though she has spent twenty years in prison for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and has endured rape and physical abuse because she’s a trans woman in a men’s cell block. 

I am cheering for Carlotta when she’s released and begins making her way through our modern world, “like a brain-damaged African elephant trying to jump into a game of double Dutch.” She laughs… show more.

Set at the height of the Trump era, this very New York City novel follows its title character, a lesbian former cop turned heroin addict who’s now fresh out of rehab and, in her new job as a private investigator, stumbles onto a murder she becomes determined to solve.

Maggie is a total mess—barely able to navigate a cell phone or the Internet, holding on for dear life at her Narcotics Anonymous meetings, stalking her ex outside her window in the pouring rain, and desperate to have her daughter, whom she was raising with her ex, back in her life.

The novel’s promise of a tight murder mystery kind of unravels, but it doesn’t even matter because Maggie’s fumbling, stumbling effort to put her life back together in a disconcertingly sleek new version of downtown Manhattan is a voyeuristic joy to follow.

The book that put British literary giant Hollinghurst on the map in 1988, this gorgeously written, fast-paced novel follows Will, a ridiculously privileged, idle, and good-looking young gay man in early 1980s London who has torrid sexual affairs with a racially diverse group of working-class men and also inadvertently saves the life of a very elderly gay aristocratic man with a homoerotic colonial past.

With its Forsterian attunement to the prejudices and vanities of the Thatcher-era British upper class, its explicit evocation of the early 20th century gay British novelist Ronald Firbank and its sometimes cringe-y look at cross-class and cross-racial desire, the novel showcases gay men driven ecstatically and obsessively by both libidinous and aesthetic yearnings—all of them oblivious to the dark clouds of AIDS gathering on London’s horizon.

This is a complex young adult contemporary novel that spotlights Mini as she singlehandedly organizes the wedding-of-the-year for her older sister and her fiancé. Amidst the primary plot of Mini pulling together the wedding and falling in love with the handsome Vir Mirchandani, there is a unifying theme of family. Nandini Bajpai does an incredible job of unpacking the elements of an Indian family, specifically in how they support each other after the loss of a loved one. It was heartwarming to see Mini come into her own by the end of her story, and I highly recommend this book to anyone with a penchant for Indian weddings, Indian culture, and young love. 

Here’s another PI series set in Boston, and while Carlotta Carlyle is nowhere near as well-known as Spenser, Linda Barnes is every bit as readable as Robert Parker. In her first outing (an Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel), ex-cabbie and ex-cop Carlyle takes on a missing person case that has her tangling with IRA gunrunners. A Trouble of Fools is my pick because it brings the ‘80s Boston I remember to life, and because of the light, humorous voice Barnes lends the proceedings.

Detectives Sarah Kelling and her much-loved husband Max Bittersohn live in her inherited house on Beacon Hill, Boston. These are detective novels of the cozy and charming sort, and because of the relationship between Sarah and Max are adventure romances as well.

Sarah has a large extended family and they enter into all the books as friends. This makes each one a friend and fun to read. MacCleod knows Boston and her descriptions of the habits and haunts of classic Beacon Brahmins/Yankees are as charming and rich as her plots. I recommend this and her other books for the fun of reading and the great plots.

Street names, the Charles River, bridges, the Back Bay, the Public Gardens, actual hotels and restaurants—Robert B. Parker’s forty Spenser novels make Boston so much a character that Parker wrote Spenser’s Boston. The sixth novel in the series, published in 1980, has Spenser searching for a missing lesbian activist who’s been kidnapped by an anti-gay group. Like Buffalo, Boston sometimes gets a lot of snow. Unlike Buffalo, which is not the snowiest city in New York but is depicted as such, Boston is not known as a snow capital. That Spenser must search during a blizzard is a welcome dose of realism.

Most people know this book due to its film adaptation, with Robert Mitchum in the title role. To me, it is a splendid book because, like all great fiction, it tells the truth. More than a great many nonfiction books, it tells the truth about the actual nature of organized crime.

It strips away the phony glamour and describes the actual nature of the mob—treacherous, violent, and unforgiving. And the dialogue is amazing! What you see in this book is not the Mafia but Irish gangsters, and they are tired blue-collar men who are just scraping by. That is what organized crime is all about today, just as it was in the 1970s.

Early Autumn made me cry from two directions. As a tween, reading about Spenser’s rescue of Paul, a shut-down, emotionally neglected boy that Spenser first assesses as “an unlovely little bastard”, I cried in sympathy and relief for Paul.

Over a summer, Spenser taught him skills, built up his strength and gave him the confidence to find his own dreams, before leaving him at the doorway to the life he now knew he wanted. As an adult, I cried with joy for Spenser, who connected with a stranger, taught what he had to teach, and changed a life.

Really helping someone in a lasting way is rarely so easy as it was in this book, but it’s a worthwhile dream and this Cinderella story gets me every time.