Say Gay: An LGBTQIA+ Books for Kids and Teens

Celebrate LGBTQIA+ pride & reveal the colorful meaning behind each beautiful rainbow stripe. Enjoy this spectrum of books brought to you by Book Passage for readers ages 3 to 18.

Picture Books

Plenty of Hugs

By Fran Manushkin

Two mommies spend a sunny day with their toddler in this cozy, rhyming picture book that is a loving celebration of family.

Harriet Gets Carried Away

By Jessie Sima

From the author and illustrator of the bestselling Not Quite Narwhal comes a sweet and funny story about remembering where you belong, no matter how far you roam, or what you’re wearing when you get there.

Love Is Love

By Michael Genhart

Open a dialogue with the children in your life about the importance of love and acceptance with this Silver Moonbeam Award Winner story celebrating open mindedness, diversity, and the LGBTQIA+ community. Perfect for your family library, Valentine's Day keepsake, or a storytime read-aloud for any day of the year.

Tuesday Is Daddy’s Day

By Elliot Kreloff

Based on the author’s own family, this book is a reminder that family comes in many forms, but always comes with love. Becky has two rooms: one at Mommy’s house and one at Daddy’s apartment, which he shares with his partner Harry. Daddy usually picks her up after school on Tuesdays, but one Tuesday mommy is there instead! What’s going on? Becky likes everything to be the same, but soon learns change can lead to a happy surprise!

Maiden & Princess

By Daniel Haack

In this modern fairy tale, a strong, brave maiden is invited to attend the prince's royal ball, but at the dance, she ends up finding true love in a most surprising places. Also check out his other book ‘Prince & Knight’.

Adventures with My Daddies

By Gareth Peter

Set off on a series of incredible adventures with an endearing, diverse family as the bedtime stories they read burst into colorful life. In this #OwnVoices picture book, the daddies and their little one battle dragons, dodge deadly dinosaurs, zoom to the moon, and explore the world in a hot air balloon, before winding down to sleep in a wonderfully cozy ending.

Black Sand Beach 2: Do You Remember the Summer Before?

By Richard Fairgray

A revelation about how Dash may or may not have spent the summer before raises the stakes even higher in the second installment of the eerie and enthralling Black Sand Beach series. Deliciously creepy and difficult to put down, the graphic novel returns readers to a supernatural shore they'll never forget. This book finds the kids in another spooky adventure that cuts back and forth between summers to find out what really happened to Dash.

Middle Grade Readers

Ana on the Edge

By A. J. Sass

Perfect for fans of George and Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World: a heartfelt coming of age story about a nonbinary character navigating a binary world.

To Night Owl From Dogfish

By Holly Goldberg Sloan, Meg Wolitzer

From two extraordinary authors comes a moving, exuberant, laugh-out-loud novel about friendship and family, told entirely in emails and letters.

Aquicorn Cove

By K. O'Neill

AQUICORN COVE is the beloved K. O'Neill story about a young girl who must protect a colony of magical seahorse-like creatures she discovers in the coral reef.

The Legend of Auntie Po

By Shing Yin Khor

Part historical fiction, part fable, and 100 percent adventure. Thirteen-year-old Mei reimagines the myths of Paul Bunyan as starring a Chinese heroine while she works in a Sierra Nevada logging camp in 1885.

Young Adult

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea

By Maggie Tokuda-Hall

In a world divided by colonialism and threaded with magic, a desperate orphan turned pirate and a rebellious imperial lady find a connection on the high seas.

Forget This Ever Happened

By Cassandra Rose Clarke

There's nothing too remarkable about Indianola: it's run-down, shabby, and sweltering, a pin-dot on the Gulf Coast. Except there is something remarkable. Memories shimmer and change. Lizards whisper riddles under the pecan trees. And worst of all, a red-lightning storm from beyond our world may just wipe the whole town off the map, if Claire and her maybe-girlfriend Julie can't stop it. Surprising, brilliant, and, like, totally tight, Forget This Ever Happened is speculative horror at its finest, featuring an #OwnVoices Queer romance and dark, dazzling world-building.

May the Best Man Win

By ZR Ellor

A trans boy enters a throw-down battle for the title of Homecoming King with the boy he dumped last summer in ZR Ellor's contemporary YA debut.

The People We Choose

By Katelyn Detweiler

Calliope has never wanted anything more than her two best friends, her moms, their house in the woods, and their family-run yoga studio—except maybe knowing who her sperm donor is. She can finally find out this summer when she turns eighteen. Then she meets her new neighbor Max, and she immediately feels a special connection, one that feels different than just friendship. But when Calliope contacts her sperm donor, she learns a surprising truth: her donor is Max's father. As she and Max struggle to redefine their friendship, Calliope realizes she has much to gain by recognizing and accepting that family is both the one she has been born into, and the one she chooses to make.