Book Recs for Drarry Fans

A compilation of published book recs given in the drarry discord #published-book-recs channel.

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send your recs!

Hello! I hope you’ve been enjoying this first week or so of book recs!

There won’t be any new posts coming for the next few days because I have queue’d up all of the recs I have and will be out of town sans wi-fi for about a week (as you read this I’m probably driving through the state of Georgia), so I wanted to take this opportunity to remind you to send in your book recs for drarry fans!

As a reminder, you can either share them in the drarry discord in the #published-book-recs channel, or send them to me as an ask (ask button is at the top of my homepage). If you’re submitting a rec, please remember to include:

Title and Author, length, genre, rating, tags, warnings, relationships, a summary or link to a summary, and your review of the book :)

Thanks everyone! <3

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That Inevitable Victorian Thing by E.K. Johnston

Genre: young adult, sci-fi

Ratings: T

Tags: Alternate Universe, the british empire, royalty, Canada, intersex character, polyamory, coming of age, friends to lovers, multiple narrators, technology

Warnings: none that I can think of

Relationships: F/F and M/F

Summary: (from Goodreads) Set in a near-future world where the British Empire was preserved, not by the cost of blood and theft but by effort of repatriation and promises kept, That Inevitable Victorian Thing is a novel of love, duty, and the small moments that can change people and the world. Victoria-Margaret is the crown princess of the empire, a direct descendant of Victoria I, the queen who changed the course of history two centuries earlier. The imperial practice of genetically arranged matchmaking will soon guide Margaret into a politically advantageous marriage like her mother before her, but before she does her duty, she’ll have one summer incognito in a far corner of empire. In Toronto, she meets Helena Marcus, daughter of one of the empire’s greatest placement geneticists, and August Callaghan, the heir apparent to a powerful shipping firm currently besieged by American pirates. In a summer of high-society debutante balls, politically charged tea parties, and romantic country dances, Margaret, Helena, and August discover they share an unusual bond and maybe a one in a million chance to have what they want and to change the world in the process —just like the first Queen Victoria.

Review: “I was skeptical about the premise of this novel - a world in which the British Empire never fell - but I think the author was aware of the potential issues and pulled it off really well. The end result is an intriguing backdrop for this summertime coming of age story which is really diverse and deals with the classic YA love triangle better than I could have ever hoped for.”

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Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Genre: young adult

Rating: T

Tags: coming of age, getting together, coming out, lgbtq literature, 1980s, Texas, Mexican-American protagonists, latinx, friends to lovers, parent-child relationships, family dynamics, masculinity, incarceration

Warnings: homophobia, violence, assault, alcohol use

Relationships: m/m

Summary: (from Goodreads) Aristotle is an angry teen with a brother in prison. Dante is a know-it-all who has an unusual way of looking at the world. When the two meet at the swimming pool, they seem to have nothing in common. But as the loners start spending time together, they discover that they share a special friendship—the kind that changes lives and lasts a lifetime. And it is through this friendship that Ari and Dante will learn the most important truths about themselves and the kind of people they want to be.

Review: “This is an absolutely amazing coming of age novel/love story. In addition to being a great story, the relationships both boys have with their parents is a real highlight of the book, and I also love the way the author makes the location come alive. There’s a great audiobook read by Lin Manuel Miranda if that’s your thing!”

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Liquor by Poppy Z Brite

Length:  352 pages

Genre:  fiction (I’ve seen it called “foodie lit”)

Rating: M

Tags: restaurants, chef life, pre-Katrina New Orleans, thriller

Warnings:  drug and alcohol use, homophobia, minor character death, gun violence

Relationships:  M/M main, M/F

Summary: Liquor is the first in a series about New Orleans based chefs Rickey and G-man.  Growing up in New Orleans, they’ve been immersed in food culture from a young age.  They started working their way up from scrubbing pots in local diners to being overworked and abruptly unemployed line cooks.  With one big idea and a stroke of luck, they’re on their way to opening their own restaurant focused completely around the great love of their city, Liquor.

Review: “Though Liquor was the first published, the novella The Value of X is a prequel.  Other books in the series include Prime, Soul Kitchen, DUCK(novella) and a few spin-off short stories available in Brite’s short story collections. I’ve read them all, and as someone who has been working in restaurants for a very long time, these books will always have a special place in my heart.”

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If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

Length: 400 pages

Genre: pyschological thriller

Rating: M

Tags: coming of age, mystery, tragedy, romance, dark academia

Warnings: MCD, violence

Relationships: M/F & M/M

Summary: On the day Oliver Marks is released from jail, the man who put him there is waiting at the door. Detective Colborne wants to know the truth, and after ten years, Oliver is finally ready to tell it.

Ten years ago: Oliver is one of seven young Shakespearean actors at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, a place of keen ambition and fierce competition. In this secluded world of firelight and leather-bound books, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingénue, extra. But in their fourth and final year, the balance of power begins to shift, good-natured rivalries turn ugly, and on opening night real violence invades the students’ world of make believe. In the morning, the fourth-years find themselves facing their very own tragedy, and their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, each other, and themselves that they are innocent.

Part coming-of-age story, part confession, If We Were Villains explores the magical and dangerous boundary between art and life. In this tale of loyalty and betrayal, madness and ecstasy, the players must choose what roles to play before the curtain falls.

Review: “i've been reading this book over the last few days and i did really enjoy it, there's a lot of The Secret History vibes as its a tale of obsession and madness with characters that walk and fall off the fine line of being a good person. There's a lot of really beautiful moments and some fantastically channeled Shakespeare, and a lot of complex characters and relationships and by the end i couldnt put it down”

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Saints and Misfits by S.K. Ali

Length: 350 pages

Genre: realistic fiction, young adult

Rating: teen

Tags: coming of age, families are complicated, Muslim characters, happy ending

Warnings: deals with consent and sexual assault, Islamophobia

Relationships: het

Summary:

There are three kinds of people in my world: 1. Saints, those special people moving the world forward. Sometimes you glaze over them. Or, at least, I do. They're in your face so much, you can't see them, like how you can't see your nose. 2. Misfits, people who don't belong. Like me--the way I don't fit into Dad's brand-new family or in the leftover one composed of Mom and my older brother, Mama's-Boy-Muhammad. Also, there's Jeremy and me. Misfits. Because although, alliteratively speaking, Janna and Jeremy sound good together, we don't go together. Same planet, different worlds. But sometimes worlds collide and beautiful things happen, right? 3. Monsters. Well, monsters wearing saint masks, like in Flannery O'Connor's stories. Like the monster at my mosque. People think he's holy, untouchable, but nobody has seen under the mask.

Except me.

Review: “This was one of my favourite books of 2017. The main character is delightful. All the supporting characters are so well done. The warnings do make it seem like the book would be a very heavy read but it reads well and it S.K does a great job at weaving in some lightness into her story. I loved this book enough to get my copy signed when the author came to my local library for a book event. This book represents. The author is Muslim and the bulk of the characters are Muslim. For those who are Canadian, the author is also Canadian!”

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The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Genre: historical fiction, gothic

Tags: angst, mystery, suspense

Warnings: incest, dub-con

Summary (from goodreads):

All children mythologize their birth...So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's collection of stories, which are as famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale as they are for the delight and enchantment of the twelve that do exist. The enigmatic Winter has spent six decades creating various outlandish life histories for herself -- all of them inventions that have brought her fame and fortune but have kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she at last wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. She summons biographer Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth, hidden by those who loved her most, remains an ever-present pain. Struck by a curious parallel between Miss Winter's story and her own, Margaret takes on the commission. As Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good, Margaret is mesmerized. It is a tale of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling but remains suspicious of the author's sincerity. She demands the truth from Vida, and together they confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves. The Thirteenth Tale is a love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children. Diane Setterfield will keep you guessing, make you wonder, move you to tears and laughter and, in the end, deposit you breathless yet satisfied back upon the shore of your everyday life.

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How To Be Both by Ali Smith

Genre: fiction

Tags: two-part, two-narrator format; art; teenage narrator; gender ambiguity; time; Italy; mother-child relationships

Summary (from Goodreads): How To Be Both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.

Review: “I loved this book, especially on gender and time. In publication, half of the printed books tell one story first, the other half tell the other story first, which is interesting because it makes the reading experience unavoidably different depending which version you get. Also, George was probably the most compelling teenager character I've read in the past decade.”

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Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Length: 300+ pages

Genre: dystopia, speculative fiction, sci-fi

Rating: E

Tags: coming of age, peril, romance, awesomeness

Warnings: MCD, rape, extreme violence, underage

Relationships: het

Summary: (from wikipedia) "Set in the 2020s where society has largely collapsed due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed, Parable of the Sower centers on a young woman named Lauren Oya Olamina who possesses what Butler dubbed hyperempathy or "sharing" – the ability to feel pain and other sensations she witnesses. As a teenager growing up in the remnants of a gated community near Los Angeles, she begins to develop a new belief system, which she comes to call Earthseed. When the community's security is compromised, her home is destroyed and her family is murdered, and she travels north with other survivors. Society outside the community walls has reverted to chaos due to resource scarcity and poverty, and mixed race relationships are stigmatized amid attacks against religious and ethnic minorities. Lauren believes that humankind's destiny is to travel beyond Earth and live on other planets, forcing humankind into its adulthood, and that Earthseed is preparation for this destiny. She gathers followers along her journey north and founds the first Earthseed community, Acorn, in Northern California."

Review: “Arrrghhhh I love this so much. Butler is the grandmother of sci-fi/speculative fiction and this is the book. Amazing and so useful if you want to write about teens dealing with and reacting to war + extreme violence. If I ever write immediate post-war drarry I'm going to reread this first.”

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The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge

Genre: fiction, mystery, horror

Tags: meta fiction, gothic, mental illness, unreliable narrators

Summary: A woman tries to find out what happened to her husband who disappeared from a mental hospital; he’d published a book purporting to reveal lost information about HP Lovecraft but what he found may not be true. (find out more on goodreads)

Review: Recommended for writers! Washington Post Review

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Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Genre: fiction, sci-fi

Tags: theatre troupe, post-apocalyptic, non-linear, Shakespeare, three timelines

Summary (from Goodreads):

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains - this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

Review: “I loved that this novel didn't focus on violence, as many post-apocalyptic books do, but on the survivors making a life after the world has ended, and how important art is in it. Shakespeare is the link that connects the stories from before the epidemic and after.”

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Vicious by V. E. Schwab

Genre: fantasy, sci-fi, young adult

Tags: superpowers, non-linear, dark, found family, murder, superheroes

Summary (from Goodreads):

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates—brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong. Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find—aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge—but who will be left alive at the end?

Review: “It has excellent characterisation, an interesting conflict and tight plotting.”

Series? There is a sequel coming out this autumn!

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Genre Tags Masterlist

fiction

fantasy

sci-fi

mystery

horror

suspense

young adult

thriller

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About Book Recs for Drarry Fans

What is this tumblr?

This is a compilation of book recommendations made in the drarry discord, with the purpose of having an archive so to speak where people can easily look back on past recs/search for recs if you are looking for published work to read!

Why?

A lot of us were talking about how we would love to read more published books but often don’t know where to start - it’s easy to find fanfic we know we’ll like, but published books are much more hit or miss. The solution: recommend books to each other!

How can I recommend a book?

If you are on the drarry discord (or would like to join it!), drop your rec in the #published-book-recs channel. If you aren’t on the drarry discord, feel free to send it to this blog as an ask. Either way please include the following info:

Title: Author: Length: Genre: Rating: Tags: Warnings: Relationships: Summary: Review:

Most important of these are tags, warnings, and a link to somewhere I can get a summary. Thank you!

What do you tag?

I tag title, author, genre, tags, warnings, relationships, and woman writers. Genre tags are organized on the home page, other than that you can click on the tags to see more of the same. I’m going to be very honest: this is not a perfect system, there may be times I tag the same things slightly differently, I apologize in advance but I’m not going to go wild with accuracy here since this is for fun!

Who are you?

I’m @violetclarity, but I just copy & paste stuff into posts - all of the recs come from other amazing members of the drarry community <3