Indieland editors recommend the following novels as upbeat escapes for Pride month. In one, a gay man rallies his down-on-its-luck town to strive for better. In another, a gay high school student lands in Los Angeles and falls for a fellow wannabe actor. And in the third, a lesbian romance, a road trip in pursuit of medicinal weed leads to love.
Charlie Suisman’s debut novel, Arnold Falls, takes place in a small town in upstate New York full of appealing crackpots. Jeebie Walker, gay and in his 40s, wants to motivate his fellow townspeople to get it together. Our reviewer says, “Suisman’s prose is often incredibly funny, and his characters are charming in their varying degrees of ridiculousness while still maintaining a realistic, human sensibility.”
In Gary Seigel’s YA novel, Haskell Himself, Haskell Hodge, who’s gay and 16, loves acting, parodying Liberace, and living in 1960s Manhattan. But when circumstances force him to move to LA, his life gets more complicated as he endures high school, finds other gay guys, and builds an acting career. This “hectic yarn deals with serious themes of maturation and belonging in a lighthearted vein that grows somewhat darker as the story proceeds,” says Kirkus. “An entertaining and perceptive YA take on the predicament of gay adolescence.”
In her lesbian romance novel A Light on Altered Land, Becky Bohan writes about second-chance love when a widowed lesbian falls for a recent divorcée—who’s inconveniently straight. But orientation be damned when these two take a road trip to a “marijuana farm in California to score some illegal cannabis oil for a friend with Lyme disease, with a stop in Yosemite National Park for sightseeing and snowshoeing.” The verdict? Our reviewer calls it a “luminous story of rejuvenating love.”
Karen Schechner is the vice president of Kirkus Indie.
