A lot of people in my offline-life often tell me that they don't know how I manage to read so much. That they don't have time to read, or they can just never get into books, or struggle to find the motivation to finish them once they do start reading. My answer to the first is normally along the lines of - then make time. Instead of sitting down and watching TV in the evenings I will nearly always stick my nose in a book; and on the days when I do watch something I normally always spend at least half an hour reading in bed before going to sleep.

I remember searching desperately for characters who looked like me (or rather, looked like the thing that I might be but was too scared to admit yet, even to myself.) I stared at every blurb I found, scanning the shelves at the school library, the public library and the ones in the bookshops in the hope that suddenly there would be a bright beam of rainbow light and any potential queer book there would launch itself into my arms. Unsurprisingly, that didn't happen.

Hello and welcome to my reading it queer rec list!! If you have no idea what I'm talking about you can check out my explanation post here and then come back to check out the book recs!

Queens of Geek is one of my favourite contemporary reads so when I discovered that not only was Jen Wilde writing a new book but that said new book was going to focus on the relationship between two women I may have shrieked a little bit. I shrieked even more when the possibility of being part of the blog tour for Going Off Script came about so you can imagine the noise when I received an email to let me know I was on it!! A huge thankyou to SwoonReads and Xpresso Book Tours for allowing me to devour this book before it hit mainstream shelves (and on that note - it's now sitting pretty on those shelves from today!! It's queer, hilarious and adorable and I 100% recommend everyone to go and buy a copy. If you need a tiny bit more encouragement then hopefully my full review can help!)

Small Town Hearts by Lillie Vale is a book that's been on my radar for a few months and is actually one of my most anticipated queer releases of 2019. Set in Oar's Rest in Maine over the summer it sounded like a complete dream of a book so when Lili from Utopia State of Mind contacted me to see if I wanted to be involved in the blog tour for it I replied with a giant YES. Well, technically I shrieked at the email, danced around my room for a couple minutes and then said yes, but the point of the story is the same and it resulted in a shiny attachment landing in my inbox; cue more happy dancing!

Before I jump into the review I want to give you all a little warning because I went into this book very unprepared. The food in Small Town Hearts is unbelievably wonderful. Lillie's descriptions are gorgeous and I was hungry for the entire time reading this, so when you pick it up please make sure you have some form of snack (ideally something baked but anything will do), because the alternative is having to put the book down to go all the way to the shop just to buy something. And you won't want to put this book down.