Blog Tour & Feature: Take It To Your Grave by Louangie Bou-Montes

Item: Take It to Your Grave
Author: Christy Jane

Crushed on by Christy Jane, on July 22, 2026, in Blog Tour, Feature, New Releases / 0 Comments

Blog Tour & Feature: Take It To Your Grave by Louangie Bou-Montes

We are thrilled to be part of the blog tour for Take It to Your Grave by Louangie Bou-Montes, out July 21st. Louangie made a serious impression with her debut, Till the Last Beat of My Heart, a queer YA paranormal about a teen who accidentally resurrects his crush, and this second novel is her going deeper into the same territory. Ghosts, queerness, the cost of being unseen, and what happens when someone finally decides to look. Before we get into the book, we want to talk about why this particular subgenre keeps getting written, and why it matters right now. Check it out below!

Take It to Your Grave

by Louangie Bou-Montes
Published by: Godwin Books
on July 21, 2026
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Goodreads

Maximiliano Rafael Guerrero Lopez “Max” has been dead for 30 years. He’s stuck as a sixteen-year-old in his childhood bedroom with no memory of how he died, and no company aside from rotting floor boards and mildew-ridden guitars.

Joaquín Felix Ladrón “Joaquín” is a high schooler who's desperate to experience something paranormal—he’d do anything to even catch a glimpse of a ghost, even if it means sacrificing his relationship with his boyfriend.

When Joaquín goes on a ghost hunt at an abandoned house that's rumored to be haunted, he and Max find their fates becoming intertwined in ways neither of them expected. But, as Max’s powers begin to grow stronger, it becomes clear that their tentative friendship may just prove to be fatal...

What the Living Cannot See

There is a question buried inside many queer ghost stories, and it is not about whether the ghost is real. It is about who gets to have their story told, and what happens to the people whose stories get suppressed before they can finish them.

Queer people have histories that have disappeared. Deaths go unexplained. Existence gets quietly removed from the record by families who preferred a different version, institutions that found them inconvenient, communities that needed them to have never been there at all. The AIDS crisis killed tens of thousands of people whose names were erased from obituaries. Queer kids have been dying in small towns for generations without anyone asking the right questions. The archive of queer history is full of gaps where people used to be. And queer teenagers are often the ones reaching past the visible world toward something true that nobody around them will confirm is real.

The ghost story is built for this.

A ghost is someone whose narrative was interrupted before it could be completed. Someone whose story was suppressed, whose death went unexplained, whose unfinished business keeps them tethered to a place that has moved on without them. The haunting is not random. It is always about something that was refused acknowledgment. And the resolution, when it comes, is never just about the ghost moving on. It requires someone living to insist that what happened mattered, that the story is worth recovering, that thirty years or a hundred years of invisibility does not mean the erasure was right.

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas reopened a door when it published in 2020. What Aiden understood is that summoning a ghost is an act of refusal. Yadriel is a trans brujo whose community’s rigid gender roles around magic refuse to recognize him for who he is, so he performs the ritual himself to prove what he already knows to be true. The ghost he summons is a boy who died in a way nobody will explain. Solving the mystery of Julian’s death is the same work as insisting on the reality of Yadriel’s own identity. Both require going past what the community is willing to acknowledge toward what is actually true.

The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass takes that work somewhere darker. Jake is a Black queer teen at a predominantly white school who can see ghosts, and the ghost he cannot shake is violent and obsessive and feeds specifically on his isolation. Ryan is writing about what happens when the thing haunting you looks like the worst version of what other people think about you. The haunting is not a mystery to solve. It is a weight that accumulates in the specific way that racism and homophobia accumulate, slowly and constantly and in ways that are hard to name because you are the only one who can see them.

Ghost Wood Song by Erica Waters puts a bisexual girl in a Southern Gothic Florida landscape where her father’s enchanted fiddle can raise the dead. Shady Grove has never gotten over losing her father, and the fiddle is the thing that connects her grief to her inherited power and to all the family secrets the dead are keeping. The queerness here is not the central tension but it is woven throughout, a love triangle between Shady and her best friend Sarah and a boy named Cedar that the book treats with genuine care rather than as a subplot to resolve. What Ghost Wood Song understands is that for queer kids in small Southern towns, the things you are not supposed to want and the things you have lost often live in the same dark room.

The Corruption of Hollis Brown by K. Ancrum is one of the most formally inventive entries in this conversation. Walt is a ghost from 1916 who possesses Hollis, a Black teenager in a dying rural town, and they share a body and fall in love through that shared space. The ghost carries the history of the town’s racial violence and class abandonment. Hollis carries the present version of that same abandonment. Their love story is also a story about refusing to let history stay buried in the ways that serve the people in power, and about two people whose stories the world decided did not matter finding each other across an impossible distance and insisting otherwise.

I, in the Shadows by Tori Bovalino and I Was a Teenage Death God by M.J. Beasi both work with the more intimate version of this. Tori gives us a queer girl and the ghost already living in her house, two people equally stuck, helping each other get unstuck. The ghost’s unfinished business and Drew’s reasons for feeling invisible mirror each other without being identical, which is the book’s smartest move. M.J. puts a trans protagonist in a haunting that is coercive, a ghost named Lou who has been using Charlie’s love for the people around them against them for years. The work of that book is about recognizing when something has power over you and finding a way to stop letting it. The ghost is not a lover or an ally. The ghost is a pattern of control that looks like necessity because it has been there so long.

All of which brings us to Take It to Your Grave by Louangie Bou-Montes. Maximilian Rafael Guerrero Lopez has been dead for thirty years with no memory of how he died. He is not just stuck. He has a story he cannot access, with no way to understand what happened to him or why he is still here. He has spent three decades invisible in a childhood bedroom, unreachable by the living world and unable to move past a death he cannot even name. Joaquín is a living queer teenager who is so hungry to feel something real that he is willing to blow up his own life for even a glimpse of it. He keeps reaching past what is supposed to be there toward what is actually true. When they find each other, the book puts two kinds of invisibility in the same room and questions what happens when someone finally decides to look.

When they find each other the premise puts two kinds of invisibility in the same room. Max has spent thirty years with no one to confirm that his story mattered. Joaquín has been reaching past what is sanctioned toward something he cannot name but knows is real. What they give each other, if the book delivers on what it is setting up, is witness. And for a queer kid in a world that keeps asking them to be invisible, being witnessed by someone who was built to look past what everyone else agrees is not there might be everything.