Great and recognizable book. Definitely recommending to my friends. I was very interested to see where this would lead and I was not disappointed.

QOTD: What are you hoping to read before the end of 2023?

I am hoping to fit in a few more books before the end of the year! I am in the mood for contemporary right now, but I’m finishing up an excellent fantasy novel too.

Today I am sharing The Queer Girl is Going to Be Okay with @hearourvoicestours in a (rather delayed) tour stop! This is one book I for sure did read before the end of 2023!

Here’s a Synopsis of The Queer Girl is Going to Be Okay:
Queer Love. Something Dawn wants, desperately, but does not have. But maybe, if she can capture it, film it, interview the people who have it, queer love will be hers someday. Or, at least, she'll have made a documentary about it. A documentary that, hopefully, will win Dawn a scholarship to film school. Many obstacles stand in the way of completing her film, but her best friends Edie and Georgia are there to help her reach her goal, no matter what it takes.

A touching and joyous story of queer friendship and girlhood set in the vibrant city of Houston, THE QUEER GIRL IS GOING TO BE OKAY will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you believe that eventually, everything will be okay.

I love the premise for this book!

This is the perfect book for middle school/high school. Three queer women all with different cultural backgrounds and hopes and dreams.

I’ve had this on the back burner for a moment as I took a bit of a hiatus.

I think the friendship is the best part of the book. Dawn was my favorite character

The title and book cover is adorable!

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This was a little bit too YA for me as an adult, but I can see that there is definitely an audience for this book.

This was a great story about friendship and love!
There is a good diversity in the cast and I liked the narration.

The Queer Girl is Going to be Okay was a wonderful short read with an amazing amount of representation. The story is full of queer joy, friendship and love, and was a very wholesome read overall. There were a couple of downfalls for me however, the first being that the novel felt like an extended short story, there wasn’t much going on and it felt like the plot could have fit in less than 100 pages. The other was that although I did enjoy the narration - having one narrator for a three POV book just didn’t work for me, I struggled to know who was talking and started blending the characters together by the end of the book. Overall, a very sweet young adult read.

Thank you to NetGalley and RB Media for providing with an Audiobook ARC of this book!

Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with an Advanced Reader Copy of this book!

The Queer Girl is Going to be Okay is a comforting debut from Dale Wells that delivers on its promise. Dawn, Edie, and Georgia are best friends in their final year of high school. Each of the girls is unabashedly queer, and facing challenges at home and in their personal life. Dawn, on whom our story
is centred, is a budding filmmaker producing the titular film “The Queer Girl is Going to be Okay” for a film festival which offers her a chance at an education and better life.


This was a fantastic 4 star read for me. “The Queer Girl is Going to be Okay” holds your hand through the difficult parts in order to show you the possibility of queer joy with a lens of realism.

I really enjoyed the characters, and loved that we got to experience their stories in different doses. Wells did a phenomenal job balancing each of the narratives, giving each of our three main girls an appropriate amount of attention without sacrificing a clear focus. Each character felt well rounded, and their stories played out in a way that left each narrative feeling complete while still leaving the main focus on Dawn.

The events of the novel played out in such a way that I found myself wincing and cheering along with characters. It was interesting a way that still felt grounded and realistic. The way the stories are told encouraged you to think more empathetically about those around you, which is something I always deeply appreciate in a novel.

I’m a teacher who runs a GSA at my school, and I’ve recommended this book to so many of my wonderful LGBTQ+ students. They are so thrilled and joyful at even the idea that a book like this one exists. I am so excited for it to make its way into the hands of queer teen readers.

Slight spoilers beyond this point:
This novel handled being trans in my favourite way I have ever read. One of the characters is revealed to be transgender only after she experiences transphobia. We spend chapters in her head, hearing her friends talk about her, understanding her inner thoughts, all as being entirely female. It is only when a character with a bigoted and upsetting worldview treats her poorly that readers are told she is trans. What a wonderful way to drive home the point that through and through: trans women are women.

I found myself having to set the book down and take it in for a minute when I realized how masterfully Wells had done this. For this reason alone, I will be recommending this book forever.

I really enjoyed this one. The audio performance was pretty good, and there were different, distinctive voices for each character which made it easy to follow along. Things I loved:

How the book was broken up.
The fierce friendships. More of this in YA please!! I loved the support and genuine love these kids had for each other.
Admitting when you’re wrong and apologizing, full stop!
The friends coming together to save the day with the film submission!
That ending was perfection.

Fully recommend picking this one up! Thanks NetGalley and the publisher for an audio ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was a cute, if somewhat flat-feeling YA. While I really loved the overall story, I felt like all of the main characters were pretty one-dimensional. Each of them had their 1-2 things that differentiated them from the others and that was kind of... it. I think this is an easy trap to fall into when writing YA.

All in all, though, I did still have a good time. I loved watching each of the girls go through their journey to get to their one thing, and loved the overall message of the book: friendship and love.

Thank you to NetGalley and RB Media for providing an advanced listening copy of this book.

This was a very good audiobook! I really like the narrator and the way the author writes! I plan to read more by this author!
The story was beautiful!

While I can appreciate the story of this one, it just fell really flat for me.
There was nothing about this one that I felt like I could enjoy, or even care about.
Which pains me to say.
Plus, the narrator was really lacklustre.

This is a wonderful, uplifting book featuring queer women and nonbinary people of color. The focus of the story is on three very good friends who are in the middle of their senior year of high school. One of them, Dawn, is working on a documentary submission for a contest, the prize for which is a full ride to film school.

Dawn desperately wants to experience queer love, and in order to get close to it, she interviews all of her queer friends for the documentary and ask them what queer love means to them. Unfortunately, her circumstances at home add a layer of difficulty to this already ambitious project. Her two best friends, Georgia and Edie, put aside their busy lives to help her.

The book is unapologetically queer and full of young women doing the best they can for themselves and their friends even when it isn't easy and will have repercussions. .

i think this is a very important book to read and i love the diversity of the characters and the queer found family so so much. i will say however, that the pacing for this book is a little off and i feel like certain things aren't fleshed out as much as i had hoped for. i really struggled trying to figure out how i wanted to rate this but i think i'm going to say 3.5!!!

A likable and readable celebration of the power of friendship and growing into yourself. It's hard enough to grow into yourself when the world hands you a comfortable mold. But with good friends, these characters are able to shape their own molds

3.25 stars

This book had an intriguing premise, but I didn’t love the execution of the story as much as I’d hoped I would. I did, however, love and appreciate the diversity of the characters, their experiences, and their backstories. It’s possible I just wasn’t in the right headspace to experience the story when I started it. That being said, I think others might really enjoy it, and I’ll definitely still consider purchasing a copy for my classroom library.

This was a fabulous, contemporary take on teens questioning their gender and sexuality. I liked that it was realistic about things and had a positive outlook.

Yes the queer girl is going to be okay!! A perfect coming of age story. I love that this book was more focused on friendship rather than love. I think that it was unique and such a joy to read. I wish I had this book when I was younger and I REALLY wish I had friends like Dawn. 4 stars!

*No Stars/Rating*

I enjoyed book, however I found it really slow paced and hard to get into. I don’t want it to seem as though I thought it was bad, I just don’t think it was for me

OK so let me tell you how I figured out this was set in Houston……… My youth counterpart at work sent me a TikTok about it. I went to further investigate because I thought it came out in 2024. I pull it up and see it just came out and I need to order it. I read the synopsis ONE MORE TIME. Get to the end and realize that says Houston. I fired my own self for that one. Because how in the world am I from this place and I didn’t know about this book?!

Aside from the shock that it was set in Houston, nothing else about this came as a shock. The main characters were all people of color, they were all queer, and they all were really good friends. I KNEW I was going to love this. The friends group was probably my favorite part. They fought, and they got mad at each other for things I thought was dumb, but also things that I felt were completely warranted. They really felt like in real life friends. I say things like that alot, but I really felt like they were tangible. And listen, if you don’t have friends like these people kiddos in this book, you did it wrong. I don’t know a single person that would write something for me if I was trying to get into a contest if they had no idea what they were doing. I don’t know a person that would try. But these kids stuck together and they helped each other even when they didn’t think anyone could help them. I was grateful they had each other. I hope this encourages other teens to not hold on to some of the things that happened in this book. I hope seeing the support in this book will help them come forward and say something.

The other thing I liked about this was the way they were all different. A lot of times when you read something that has more than 2 POVs it gets confusing and you don’t know who is who half the time. But in this book they were all different by the things they had going on. But because of this I did feel like the stories could have used more detail or the characters could have been fleshed out a little more, but it was mainly because there was so much going on. Since everyone had their own story, everyone also had their own plot and resolutions and with it being less than 8 hours long, it just could have used some more stuff.

The individual stories tho were really good for what we did get and I would have loved to have a full length novel on every character. Like the film festival plot thread. I would have loved to “accompany her to different interviews, or even help find resources for her dad. It was just something that I wish we could have seen more of. But I guess that was the point. In the other stories we got to see the actual stories that might have been featured in the documentary she was making. And I thought that was cool. I also wanted to know what was wrong with her dad. Besides the grief. There had to be some mental illness there too. And the way her friends showed up and never judged her? Ugh they were squad goals.

I also loved how this book tricked me. I went in to this expecting it was going to be a light feel good novel, but there are some heavy topics in it here and there. At some points I was sad, but at others I was smiling from ear to ear. This book will definitely put you through the ringer, but in the end you’ll be smiling just like I was.

This wasn’t what I was expecting at all, but I’m glad for that. This is why I go into books without knowing anything at all. I like to be surprised. And this one will definitely do that for you. Give yourself a treat and read this one today!

Real Rating 3.5

Sweet, queer found family ft highschoolers in Texas. Hopeful, but somewhat grounded. I think this would be a great book for a queer teenager who feels that weird sense of anything being possible, just maybe not right now. That being said, I'm an adult, and I enjoyed this book.

I saw on the author's Twitter that they wrote this book while they were in high school, and that made a lot of sense to me. The characters and their concerns felt very teenage, but not necessarily in a bad way. I don't know that the writing was impeccable, but I thought it showed a lot of promise. There were some moments that I thought were really poetic. If this is what the author can do as a teenager, I'm really excited what they can do in a few years.

Thanks to NetGalley and RB Media Recorded Books for access to the audiobook!