Hello and welcome to the July 2025 edition of the Queer Lit Review! This month we have a teen girl falling for the guy at the record store, a trans teen rooming with an old flame, and two business rivals working together.
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Title/Author: The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't A Guy at All by Sumiko Arai
Reviewer: Tali
Summary: Popular and fashionable high schooler Aya has a secret: her offbeat taste in music. When she drops into a record store looking for the '90s alt-rock she loves, she immediately develops a crush on the cool and mysterious guy who works there. But what will she do when she finds out that her crush is actually her female classmate, Mitsuki?
Genre: Teen manga, yuri, romance
Series: The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All
Format: Physical book
Length: 184 pages
LGBTQ+ Orientation: Sapphic/questioning leads, one of them gender nonconforming
Content Warnings: Mild bullying & social exclusion
Well-Written/Editor Needed: Well-written
Would I Recommend?: Yes
Personal Thoughts: This manga started as a webcomic posted by the author on Twitter in 2021, where it built social media buzz and a fanbase. In the past year, it’s found new audiences as it’s been published in physical manga volumes and greenlit for an upcoming anime adaptation.
On an artistic level, The Guy She Was Interested In… is a treat. It’s known affectionately by its fans as “the green yuri” for the distinctive neon-green backgrounds of the panels. This unique color palette makes the black and white foregrounds (usually close-ups of the characters) jump out. The characters are lovingly designed and drawn — I especially enjoyed the intricate details in Aya and Mitsuki’s outfits and hairstyles, which are not only fun to look at but also help establish the characters’ vibes and personalities. Facial expressions and body language are also very clear and well-realized, which makes the panels dynamic and brings the characters to life.
Narratively, The Guy She Was Interested In… is fun, though not groundbreaking. The first volume mines some tension and humor from its “mistaken identity” premise without stretching it out for too long. Once Aya and Mitsuki know who each other are, most of the rest of the volume is taken up by the two girls dealing with jitters and butterflies, struggling to communicate, and dancing around their possible feelings for each other. Anyone who has ever felt like a “useless lesbian” will relate to Aya and Mitsuki’s nervousness and fumbling around each other. This lack of forward momentum was fine for the beginning of the story, but I hope that future volumes will push the relationship forward and take Aya and Mitsuki’s story in a more unambiguously romantic direction.
One aspect of this manga that felt like a breath of fresh air was Mitsuki’s gender nonconformity, a rarity in the yuri genre. I really liked her alternative fashion sense that she rocks while she works at the record store and plays music. Her masc style choices, the reactions she gets, and the balance she strikes between being true to herself and blending in at school are addressed explicitly in the narrative in ways that feel convincing and real.
This is an enjoyable read that’s appropriate for teens and adults alike. Catch up now before the anime drops!
Title/Author: And They Were Roommates by Page Powars
Reviewer: Ana
Summary: Charlie has gotten into a top boarding school, and while he’s proud to be trans, he’d prefer to go stealth. Due to a paperwork mix-up, he’s assigned to share a room with the only person who could out him: Jasper, with whom Charlie once shared an ill-fated summer romance. But Jasper doesn’t even recognize Charlie since their situationship happened before his transition. As the principal’s nephew, Jasper can help get Charlie his own room…in exchange for Charlie helping his secret club write love letters. It seems easy enough, but the more time Charlie spends discussing romance with Jasper, the more old feelings start to rekindle.
Series/Standalone: Standalone
Genre/Sub-Genre: Teen Romance
Book Format: eBook
LGBTQ+ Orientation: Trans, Achillean (specifically, both main characters are bi!)
Content Warnings: A few mentions about fearing forced outing, but they’re kept very vague and brief. I can't really give details without it turning into a spoiler, but there's also a situation involving questionable ethics related to privacy/consent -- but it's not actually as bad as it sounds!
Well-Written/Editor Needed: Well-written
Would I Recommend?: Yes
Personal thoughts: And They Were Roommates solidified my opinion that Page Powars is one of the best YA authors currently writing. His debut, The Borrow a Boyfriend Club, is one of my favorite books, and I was terrified of a “sophomore slump.” However, as soon as I saw the chapter titles, I knew I shouldn’t have doubted him. This novel delivers the same engaging plot lines, delightful characters with great development, and masterful prose that are becoming the author’s trademarks. Several moments had me laughing out loud, and the overall vibes actually managed to make me nostalgic for my own school days. Read this if you’re looking for low stakes, a sweet romance, and sitcom-worthy cast!
Title/Author: Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
Reviewer: Laura B.
Summary: Mutual Interest follows three queer characters finding a way to succeed and be happy at the turn of the 20th century. Vivian is a lesbian with a head for business, so she marries Oscar, a gay businessman whose success is on a downward spiral. To help Oscar’s business recover, Vivan convinces him to partner up with his rival, Squire. Of course, Oscar and Squire’s rivalry develops into an unexpected romance as their business begins to thrive.
Series/Standalone: Standalone
Genre/Sub-Genre: Historical Fiction
Book Format: Physical Book
Length: 317 pages
LGBTQ+ Orientation: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual
Content Warnings: Homophobia, dubious consent
Well-Written/Editor Needed: Editor needed
Would I Recommend?: No
Personal thoughts: I really liked the idea of this, but it just didn’t work for me in practice. From the very beginning, I struggled to connect with the writing style — I found it to be overly flowery in a way that came off as trying too hard. There were lines that genuinely made me roll my eyes. At first, I thought that this was going to be a book that I wouldn’t like myself but also wouldn’t actively dislike, but unfortunately I truly ended up disliking it.
I could have gotten past the writing style if I loved even a single character, but I found all of them to be fairly unlikable. Vivian is a character I should have loved: she’s driven, she’s creative, and she doesn’t worry about what other people think of her. But she’s also cold, selfish, and extremely unaware of her own privilege. Throughout the book we see that Vivan is unsympathetic towards anyone who wants to change society instead of making the systems work for them, particularly anyone who is pro-union. Oscar, both individually and in his relationships, comes off as pretty pathetic. And Squire, while the most likable of the bunch, sometimes seems like a manic pixie dreamboy neurodivergent stereotype. When I pick up a found family story, I expect flawed but still lovable characters, and these three were mostly just flawed.
The characters’ relationships with each other were similarly underdeveloped. I expected this book to be fairly romance heavy based on the blurb, but I wouldn’t describe it as a romance at all. I felt almost no chemistry between any of the characters, and Oscar and Squire’s romance kind of just happened and then existed with no real emotion. It is difficult to care about a relationship when you see almost none of it! Squire and Oscar kiss almost out of nowhere midway through the book — I didn’t feel that we had seen them interact enough at this point to understand why they would like each other after being rivals. You can’t do rivals to lovers without there being some dramatics as the characters realize they’re falling for each other! And then immediately following the kiss, the book jumps 10 years into the future and all of a sudden Oscar and Squire are happily in love and have a whole system set up with Vivan, and we get to see none of this develop. This was a real bummer, because I think following the trio as they figure out a way to be happy and true to themselves within society’s standards would have been interesting! This time jump also means we don’t get to see Vivian really develop their business into an institution and figure out how to keep secretly running it, another plotline that would have been interesting.
When reading reviews of the book after finishing it, I saw a lot of people mentioning that there was very little dialogue and we didn’t see the characters communicating with each other very much. This observation really struck me and explains why the book has such a sense of “tell, don’t show”: instead of reading about the characters interacting, the author is just recounting things that have already happened. This resulted in my finishing the book and feeling like I had just read 300 pages where almost nothing happened.
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