Every year, Danika and the other Lesbrary reviewers talk about our favorite sapphic books we read this year, whether they were published in 2023 or not. This time, there are so many reviewers at the Lesbrary that we needed to split this into two posts. The next one will round up Danika’s top ten-ish sapphic books of the year, and this one is the top sapphic book from nine of the other Lesbrary reviewers.

These picks range from brand-new 2023 releases to a 1950s novel, and they include genres from fantasy and sci-fi to memoir to graphic novels, romance, and more. There’s something here for everyone!

Without further ado, here are the Lesbrary reviewers’ favorite sapphic books they read this year!

The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo

My favorite sapphic read of 2023 was The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo. This made me appreciate The Great Gatsby more, as I never really liked the original. But coming from Jordan’s perspective, it really fleshed the side characters out more and left Jay Gatsby on the sidelines.

The added magical elements gave it another dimension that melded well with the setting, including the racial tensions happening between Asians and Asian Americans in the country.

Check out my full review for more of my thoughts.

—Meagan

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H.

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H. is a coming-of-age memoir that connects stories from the Quran to the author’s own experiences, from discovering her sexuality and gender, to navigating crushes and dating, to moving to the U.S. and struggling to find community as a queer hijabi Muslim. With honest reflection, the author discusses such issues as having white Americans invalidate her queerness for, among other things, choosing not to come out to her parents, as well as the string of straight women she crushed on in order to feel safe from the murky waters of the next steps. In each case, her faith provides strength and solace.

This memoir is something special. Despite the audiobook not being narrated by the author, listening to it felt as personal as if it were. The book’s depiction of survival in the face of alienation particularly resonated with me, especially with all the ways the author finds to both connect with and stay guarded from themself and others. The book is beautifully written and deeply contemplative, with the stories from the Quran providing a compelling framework for each essay. I’m sure many readers will find meaning in this bold tale of reclamation.

Content warnings: suicidal ideation; bigotry including islamophobia, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny; and discussions of domestic abuse. —Emory Rose

If You’ll Have Me by Eunnie

Everyone who knows me knows I love, love, love graphic novels. Every sapphic I’ve spoken to this summer knows that I AM OBSESSED WITH THIS BOOK. It is the perfect blend of fluffy, sweet, funny, heartfelt, sincere, aching-but-not-torturous. The main characters are delightfully charming but still fully realized, multidimensional and struggling with their own conflicts and baggage.

I’ve already reviewed it here, but it’s basically a peak low-stakes slice-of-life fluff and healing relationship dynamics. It’s not a manhwa/manga, though there is a undeniable stylistic influence. But it is SO GOOD and should be right up there with Heartstopper and Bloom and Lumberjanes and all those other coming-of-age graphic novels, even if this one is set in college and deals with slightly older characters than those. —Anna N.

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane

I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself is a fascinating look at an autocratic society that relies on shame and guilt as a form of punishment. The story is told in the second person, with Kris (our protagonist) speaking to her baby and offering some small bits of background as the story progresses. It is very character-driven as we see Kris’s world form and change around her child, even as she questions the injustices of the world she was born into. For a book that deals with some incredibly hard themes, I Keep My Exoskeletons To My Self is surprisingly accessible and simple. I would recommend this book for fans of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea.  —Chloe

Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date by Ashley Herring Blake

As a massive fan of the Bright Falls series, picking my favorite book of the year was pretty easy. Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date has all the same emotional weight, charm, and humor of the previous entries in the series. The chemistry between Iris and Stevie is palpable, with plenty of tantalizing lead-up to their eventual realization that their “fake relationship” was something more. The way Ashley Herring Blake plays with common tropes in romance was also fantastic. Lastly, what really sets the book apart from so many other was how love and affection were represented as sometimes as just being there for your partner and putting in the work when they need you. It’s a definite must-read for any fan of contemporary sapphic romance. —Jamie

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

This book is the epitome of sapphic yearning. I’m so glad to have finally read a sapphic classic with a happy ending. It was the healing I desperately needed. What I loved most about the book is how openly and intimately we delve into the character’s thoughts and feelings. The movie adaptation, starring Cate Blanchett, was brilliant and breathed new life into the characters! It was refreshing! Rarely do I love both the book and the movie adaptation and this was one of those remarkable exceptions!

I loved how Highsmith crafted each scene: it was profoundly contemplative and emotionally charged. A masterpiece! —SK

The Raven and the Reindeer by T. Kingfisher

This felt like such a wonderful year of sapphic reads that it’s hard to pick just one, but I think that I’ll have to go with The Raven and the Reindeer by T. Kingfisher. Maybe it’s cheating because technically I read it years ago and it’s one of the first sapphic books I read, but this was the first year that I revisited it to see if it held up. It absolutely did! It’s a reimagining of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen” and is the perfect wintry read. The story follows Gerta, determined to find her friend Kay stolen away by the Snow Queen, but she quickly learns that perhaps this isn’t as simple of a story as she thought. It has bandits and witches and magical flying otters, and yet amidst all of this, Gerta feels so real as a girl finally coming into her own. I’ll read anything by T. Kingfisher, but a sapphic retelling with a snarky raven named Mousebones will always rise to the top for me. —Katherine

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

My favorite sapphic book of 2023 was Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh.  Tesh wove an incredible queer space opera with complex worldbuilding, a space cult, and aliens. Then she gave her main character Kyr one of the best redemption arcs I’ve encountered since Zuko in Avatar: the Last Airbender. I’ve rarely experienced such a complete turnaround in going from finding a character insufferable to rooting for them completely, and I want everyone to enjoy this expert character work with me.

The field of hit science fiction has been joyfully crowded the past couple of years between The Locked Tomb and Murderbot, but if you’re in between books of those two worthy series, I would pencil Some Desperate Glory into your schedule. I couldn’t put it down once I got started. —Maggie

Those Who Wait by Haley Cass

My favorite sapphic romance that I read this year is Those Who Wait (2020) by Haley Cass. Hopeless Sutton Spencer meets the much more confident Charlotte Thompson after Sutton’s friend signs her up for a dating app. Sounds good, but what’s the twist? Sutton is a congressman’s daughter, and Charlotte is trying to get that congressman’s endorsement as she attempts to become one of the youngest people ever to be elected to Congress. Oh, and Charlotte is also the granddaughter of a former president. If you miss The West Wing but could live without the Sorkin gaze, then read Those Who Wait immediately. Here’s hoping a studio or streamer picks this novel up and gives it the Bridgerton treatment in 2024. —Liv

Last Christmas, a close friend turned to me and plaintively, frustratedly asked “What is the point of art?”

Our table had been discussing the increasing reports about creative exploitation and unfair compensation in film and television. The cloudy night had cast a gloomy mood over us despite the holiday cheer, our low spirits punctuated by our shared inability to come up with a convincing answer. I left dinner discontent, her words spinning in my mind sans resolution.

But a little over half a year later, I found one at FlameCon. Amidst the brilliant colors, cosplays and ebullient chatter occasionally interrupted by the loud enthusiasm of people finally meeting a favorite creator or one whose work really got them in their hyper-specific sweet spot for sapphic selkie girls or messy, morally ambiguous alien anthropologists, I saw how the shared language of fandom, of queer art theory, of the internet-enabled intersection between the two, was all bringing people together.

Alyssa Wong, current writer for my most favorite Star Wars thing ever: the Doctor Aphra comics. This is for all of you who think a museum heist in outer space sounds like a fun date night idea. It is also for any sapphic who envied Han Solo’s swagger and was also totally convinced they’d have treated Leia way better than him…. even though your dating history strongly suggests otherwise.

Even as the United States sees massive rollbacks to basic LGBTQ+ rights and literary freedom, queer stories are more in demand than ever—I walk through the YA section of my local library regularly, filled with the bittersweet delight of seeing an ever-growing number of explicitly sapphic books on the shelves. We didn’t even have Pride Month displays when I was a kid, and I only stumbled upon Malinda Lo’s Ash after a straight crush told me it was “weird”. But now, there are organized movements vocally, visually defending the right to read graphic novels like Fun Home, Moonstruck, Gender Queer, and This One Summer. I couldn’t even say the word gay until I started college, let alone imagine going to a fan convention that celebrates both the biggest out names on the Big 2 roster and the smallest self-published zine creators with abundantly gay abandon.

“FlameCon is so beautiful, because this is something we didn’t have in the small press, self-publishing world 10 years ago. And it was always fun because, like finding those other creators walking around, you form that community in ‘meatspace’. And then they become the people that are recommending stuff and you’re reading their stuff. They’re helping you find other stuff. Because I know you’ve all said titles that I’ve never heard of, you know? That sort of thing is really cool when you’re going through a conversation.”

~ Greg Lockard (he/him) 

With its volunteer-run programming and many, many self-published book and zine sellers, FlameCon offers attendees a little oasis of creator-controlled and riotously boundless self-expression. It’s a chance for people to network, take note of rising talent, and celebrate the stories that mean the most to them. Usually by completely transforming them. Alternate New Yorks, Superbat kisses, and bloodstained femgaze fighters are just a taste of what’s on display. There was also, as always, a spectacular array of anime merch that eluded my not insignificant knowledge of the genre.

I was pleased to note, however, that recent internet trends had sparked new fervor for the Trigun franchise. Merilly fanfiction has long been my safe harbor, the sort of tender, deeply felt sapphic relationship that doesn’t have the heightened emotional fraughtness of Harlivy or the raw-nerve traumatic underpinnings of Korrasami, Bubbline, Hollstein, or most other favorites. It warms my heart to watch others find such harbors for themselves, and then populate them with all manner of original works—like the grounded and sweet “Girls Like You” webcomic, or the unhinged goldmine that is SuperCorp fanfiction. Seriously, the ingenuity and independence of queer creators never ceases to surprise.

“…capitalism is not on our side. Capitalism is only interested in passing, advertising, marketing and so on to the widest market segment available. So we can’t even run a paid ad to tell you our stuff exists. Because we can’t advertise it, because the best we can do is maybe target like RuPaul’s Drag Race or a piece of media that is so large that Facebook thinks it’s worth targeting. So you are much better served by following creators.”

~ Chris Ceary (she/her) 

“Don’t hesitate to follow people whose current project is not your thing, because their next project may be. Writers especially do all kinds of weird, weird things.”

~ S.W. Sondheimer (she/her) 

Which brings me to the point of it all. Art is our oldest and deepest form of communication, of connection. Whether that takes the form of riotous cheering after a speaker drops a deep-cut reference, or the audience’s knowing smiles when every panelist mentions a history of fanfic or fanart, there is a sense of community to be found through sharing stories. In finding the words to describe our experiences—finally being able to articulate who we are and knowing how we got here—we learn to understand others. Maybe not as well as ourselves, but there is something beautiful about the way art can offer us reflections that ring truer than anything we see in the backlit silhouettes on department store windows.

To paraphrase what Maia Kobabe said in the excellent short documentary “No Straight Lines”, sometimes we don’t recognize ourselves in photographs, in silver-lined mirrors whose reflections don’t offer much in the way of silver linings. But in art, we can draw/write/portray ourselves however we want. However we feel, need, believe, desire, live, and wish. And that can open up possibilities we couldn’t perceive before we took a pen in hand.

Art teaches us that we are not alone, and that shared passions can lie in unexpected people. Watching the milling crowds trading artwork and recommendations, I couldn’t help but smile. Because all those little communications open windows into others’ lives, offering languages both visual and textual for sharing and validating our experiences, and for making meaning of them. Those conversations show that people care, for better or worse, what others have to say about the world we live in. That they are still looking for stories to share, to adapt, to define the future they are building for themselves and others.

“If I am writing about a culture different than my own, I have multiple people from that background read my work, and I’m really sad that we use this term ‘sensitivity readers’. What I call it is fact checking. You know, if I put in a tractor mechanic, I want a tractor mechanic to read this and make sure it looks right.”

~ Jennifer Camper (she/her) 

On another panel, Charlie Jane Anders and other spec fic writers recommended Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s Writing the Other for all those aspiring writers wondering how to write diversity into their characters. Meanwhile, Camper continued with recommendations to at least start by reading works by people from the communities or identities you wish to represent, in order to see how they choose to represent themselves—and why.

Jennifer Camper and some of her contributions to queer comics history. This woman is an icon. Find a copy of “No Straight Lines” at your local (university?) library for a glimpse at the truly rich history of this slowly growing slice of self-expression.

Speaking of how people choose to represent themselves, I planned to write something poignant and touching about the panel on queer vampires, but I was so swept away by the energy and cheering and pure delight of being immersed in all my favorite aspects of my favorite niche interests (queer history, monstrousness in art, lesbian vampires, B-movie metaphors, etc.) that I came out of it with a sense of complete restorative well being…and that’s it. It’s amazing how wonderful those moments of total acceptance feel after a lifetime of self-censorship, how powerful, affirming and centering it is to experience such enthusiastic communal understanding. 

“I like working with Claudia Aguierre because…she’s a queer, lesbian, Mexican woman. And so I can write stuff in there that’s queer and Mexican...Like, there is a shorthand that I think comes with working with other queer people and it sometimes feels a little more like freedom. You’re like, “Okay, I don’t have to explain.””

~ Terry Blas (he/him) 

“I always bring all the different little pride stickers and lay them out. And then I get these kids who walk up and like, that’s awesome. These feral teens, it’s like “I see you, I was you, I get it” and I think that’s the key thing. We talk about things like gaydar—we do have a way of finding each other out in the world, which I think is really cool.”

~ David R. Slayton (he/him) 

This year, I bought a Vashwood print for someone close to me, who abruptly came out over the phone when I casually mentioned that I couldn’t talk because I was at “a gay comic-con”. 

This little anecdote is a testament to how even the most innocuous complaints about Ino and Hinata being a better endgame, or jokes about cosplaying “all the black-haired bisexuals” may come across as cringy to some, but show others that you are someone they can turn to. Someone they can trust. Someone who will hike up and down an artist’s alley to find them a slash print that is not gay enough to freak out their parents, but soft enough to offer hope for a loving future.

Symbols are powerful things, and as Barthes’ would likely agree, our modern mythmakers aren’t Homer, Ovid or Aesop (though their narrative structures and values continue to hold outsize influence). Our modern Hesiods include people like Stephanie Brown, Marjorie Liu, Kieron Gillen, and Natasha Alterici, whose art was one of the promotional prints for “Sharp Wit & The Company of Woman”. I love her art, and Heathen was an excellent interpretation of Norse mythology and regional history.

Stephanie Brown, writer for the Nubia series. I really appreciated the care Brown gave the characters’ backstories, as well as all the amazing artists who worked on the interiors. The cover gallery is gorgeous, too. It definitely benefits from a certain familiarity with DC comics lore, but it is a solid starting point for someone looking to dip their toes into the vast ocean of superhero comics.

While these creators may not be quite as canonized as the bust inspirations that came before, their contributions to queer imaginings are powerful refusals to soften edges, to keep room for complexity, fallibility and the driving forces of desire that echo through the most resonant legends. Their characters, in all their other-landishness, play with and subvert the abstraction of archetype to reveal far more boundary-blurring realities that hew closer to what it means to be human in an ever-changing and often destabilizing world. There are quiet reckonings on these pages, as world-shakers and mountain-movers make way for smaller-scale consequences that weigh no less heavy on their makers’ shoulders, or private pleasures that refuse to be generic or prescriptive, that insist on specificity and subjectivity for the characters even as their creators’ wink at the inspirations.

“…we get to problematize them and get to make them weirder and more interesting, but also simply more authentic sounding…I find if I’m writing a script for a comic where I know the artist is also queer, I don’t have to do as much work whereas if the artist is straight I’d have to be like ‘Male, handsome. Woman, don’t put the camera up her ass.’”

~ Anthony Oliveira (he/him) 

“I think things have really changed. And I hope they keep changing. And I hope that the more queer stories that we have out there, the more doors are open…now that we have more queer people writing queer characters…we don’t all have to be packaged a certain way to be respectable, to be commodified. So yeah, we’re just writing people, and people are messy and weird and delightful and awful, and it’s great.”

~ Alyssa Wong (they/them)

“Art requires truth” is one of the last lines from Mari Walker’s taut, disquieting 2021 character study See You Then. While I wasn’t able to attend the last panel on Intimacy in Comics, it was the line that came to mind while I was waiting for the train back home. In this era of microcurated realities and fandom mentalities that have spilled beyond con floors and discussion boards into arenas of greater effect, connection and the truth it demands of us take on new significance and meaning. Art takes on that meaning, that significance, that urgency. It becomes that hand reaching out through the obfuscation, opacity, fear and loathing; a reminder that there is so much more out in the world, and in history, than any of us can ever begin to experience. Can ever dream of imagining.

So make art, make love and tell the stories only you can.

NOTE: All the quotes are from published authors, artists, and editors. Check out their work!

Do you love reading sapphic books? Feel like talking about them at least once a month? Want to be buried in an insurmountable pile of free sapphic ebooks? Join the Lesbrary!

I am looking for more reviewers at the Lesbrary! You just have to commit to one review a month of any sapphic book and in return you get forwarded all of the sapphic ebooks sent to us for possible review. You also get access to the Lesbrary Edelweiss and Netgalley accounts, where you can request not-yet-released queer titles.

I’m looking particularly for more reviewers of color, disabled reviewers, and trans reviewers, but anyone who regularly reads sapphic books is welcome!

If you’re interested in joining the Lesbrary, send me an email at danikaellis at gmail with an example of a book review you’ve written. (It doesn’t have to have been published/posted anywhere before.) We’d love to have you on board!