By Rhys Wright, Amy Blay, Jodie Walls and Shan Heyworth
To celebrate Bisexual Awareness Week and Bisexual Visibility Day, we’d like to recommend some thrilling fiction with positive bi representation.
Old Enough by Haley Jakobson
For anyone about to head off to university for the first time, Haley Jakobson’s Old Enough is the campus novel you need to read.
Nineteen-year-old Savannah Henry is fresh out of the closet as a bi woman and navigating the complicated social dynamics of a new queer friend group. Just as Sav is starting to feel at ease with her life, things take a turn when her childhood best friend gets engaged. Forced to put on a happy face for the wedding festivities, she finds herself confronting the trauma of a sexual assault she had done her best to forget.
Old Enough alternates between first and second person. It uses first person for the present-day sequences when Sav is defining her own identity and second person for Sav’s childhood when she was inseparable from her best friend, Izzie. It’s a stylistic choice that perfectly reflects the novel’s themes of identity and self-discovery.
Nominated for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction, Jakobson’s debut novel positions queer joy and queer community as a powerful means of healing. It presents Sav’s bisexuality as a central part of her sense of self. As the novel follows an eclectic group of characters Sav first meets in a Gender and Sexuality Studies seminar, the community formed plays an integral role in helping Sav to move on from her past and look towards the future.
Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune
Wallace Price is dead. What awaits him is not bleak, empty nothingness, nor punishment for his heartless nature. Instead, he finds himself guided to Charon’s Crossing, a tearoom run by a ferryman named Hugo; there Wallace is given a week to cross over. Feeling unfulfilled by the life he lived, he decides to use this short time to make amends and learn what it truly means to live and love, aided by Hugo’s company and a good cup or two of tea.
A standalone novel from award-winning author TJ Klune (best known for The House in the Cerulean Sea), Under the Whispering Door is a character-driven fantasy inspired by A Christmas Carol that follows Wallace’s transition away from his old self: an unlikeable, cold-hearted lawyer whose funeral was attended by very few.
Amidst the exploration of death, grief and second chances lies a heartwarming romance between Wallace and Hugo, his new afterlife companion. With bisexuality often underrepresented – or switched out for other labels – in media, Klune made a point to explicitly state Wallace’s sexuality in the narration, saying in an interview with Syfy, “I try to be as inclusive as possible. So if I'm going to have a character be bisexual, it's going to be damn well on-page that they're bisexual […] It is going to be said out loud because that kind of representation it's still not where it needs to be.”
Described by The Guardian as “a whimsical, warm-hearted fantasy that suggests it is never too late to make a positive change in life – or afterwards,” Under the Whispering Door is the perfect book for those seeking a cosy read with affirming bisexual representation, a sweet romance and a comforting outlook on death and the afterlife.
This Is Why They Hate Us by Aaron H. Aceves
This Is Why They Hate Us is a coming-of-age novel that captures the chaos and conflicting emotions involved in being a teenager and trying to come to terms with who you are. Seventeen-year-old Mexican-American Enrique is bisexual and is determined to finally get over his feelings for one of his best friends, Saleem, by pursuing other romantic prospects. These prospects include stoner-jock Tyler, senior class president Ziggy, and Manny, who seems like he’s definitely interested.
Enrique’s identity as a bisexual Mexican American is not commonly found in Young Adult books. “I can’t think of a traditionally published YA novel about a bisexual Mexican-American boy written by a bisexual Mexican-American author,” Aceves said in an interview with We Need Diverse Books; “I can’t believe I get to take tiny, unique moments from my bi little life and put them into a book that tens, if not dozens, of people are going to read.”
The novel explores the excitement of crushes, the fear and anxiety that surround coming out and depicts Enrique’s struggles with his mental health. His fears and his overthinking nature are clear from the start of the novel, yet throughout, he begins to realise the importance of always staying true to himself.
Blue-Skinned Gods by SJ Sindu
In Tamil Nadu, India, pilgrims flock to visit a young boy with blue skin, believed to be the reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. As he grows up, the boy, Kalki, must undergo trials to prove his status as a god, but along the way, he grapples with his faith and identity, including his bisexuality.
This is a story primarily about the complexities of religion, but it is also about identity. Author SJ Sindu expressed in an essay on Writing.ie, that, compared to their first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which centres on a character’s struggle with coming out, in Blue-Skinned Gods, they were “more interested in creating a protagonist whose bisexuality, while a fact of his life, is not a large focus of his story but simply present”. While Kalki’s bisexual identity is not the central focus of the novel, his queerness and relationships with men and women have a strong and constant presence that interacts with the other themes and forms part of Kalki’s coming of age.
Blue-skinned Gods is a complex and beautiful book which tackles themes of religion, family and identity, which are intertwined with Kalki’s exploration of sexuality. While not necessarily a book about bisexuality, it is undoubtedly a bisexual book, which was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction.
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