Book Recommendations: Her Name in the Sky & This Must Be the Place by Kelly Quindlen

As many readers probably know, it is #SapphicSeptember, and we read Queer All Year, but we can do some special shoutout recommendations. Having been fans of Kelly Quindlen since She Drives Me Crazy landed on our favorites list in 2021, and have finally been digging deeper into her catalog. Enter Her Name in the Sky and This Must Be the Place, both set in the American South, about queer girls navigating their Southern communities.

There is a kind of queer story that does not get told enough and Kelly is here to write it. Not the coastal city coming out narrative, not the chosen family found in a queer utopia, but the story of being gay in a place that has a very clear idea about who you are supposed to be. The American South is not a monolith and queer people have always existed there, loved there, built lives there, and stories are finally starting to catch up to that reality. Books like Kelly’s matter because they tell queer kids in those places that their stories are worth telling, and they tell everyone else that queerness exists even in places where acceptance may not be expected. Especially when we can be so dismissive of the South as a whole.

Her Name in the Sky has a story behind it: Kelly originally self-published it in 2014 when queer YA was not having its moment yet, and it sold 50,000 copies entirely through word of mouth in the online queer community, readers pressing it into each other’s hands and calling their libraries to add it to the catalogue. That is the kind of thing that happens when a book finds the people who needed it. It has been republished this year donning a new cover and added scenes, a new author’s note, and an epilogue set on the morning of Hannah and Baker’s wedding that ties directly into her recent release, This Must Be the Place. Hannah is a senior in a conservative Louisiana community who falls in love with her best friend Baker while doing everything she has been taught to do right, and we expect it to be exactly as tender and specific and heartbreaking as a decade of devoted readers have been telling us it is. If you have not read it yet, now is the time.

This Must Be the Place is her newest, out now, and the premise alone had us. Eighteen-year-old Louisa inherits a gay bar in Alabama from her great-uncle, a football legend who kept his queerness completely hidden from his hometown. His grumpy ex-partner wants to sell the bar. Louisa wants to save it, along with Hannah & Baker and other townsfolk. And then the football coach sets his sights on tearing the whole place down to build an athletic facility, which is its own particular kind of erasing a queer legacy while celebrating the man who built it. That tension, between honoring someone fully and honoring only the parts of them that made the community comfortable, is exactly the kind of story we need right now when queer history is being actively scrubbed from public life.

Her Name in the Sky

by Kelly Quindlen
Published by: Roaring Brook Press
on January 27, 2026
Genres: Contemporary, LGBTQIA+, Young Adult
Bookshop
Goodreads

Hannah wants to spend her senior year of high school going to football games and Mardi Gras parties with her tight-knit group of friends.

The last thing she wants is to fall in love with a girl--especially when that girl is her best friend, Baker.

Hannah knows she should like Wally, the kind, earnest boy who asks her to prom. She should cheer on her friend Clay when he asks Baker to be his girlfriend. She should follow the rules of her conservative Louisiana community--the rules that have been ingrained in her since she was a child.

But Hannah longs to be with Baker, who cooks macaroni and cheese with Hannah late at night, who believes in the magic of books as much as Hannah does, and who challenges Hannah to be the best version of herself.
And Baker might want to be with Hannah, too--if both girls can embrace that world-shaking, yet wondrous, possibility.

This Must Be the Place

by Kelly Quindlen
Published by: Roaring Brook Press
on May 26, 2026
Genres: Contemporary, LGBTQIA+, Young Adult
Bookshop
Goodreads

A queer YA romance sizzling with chemistry by Kelly Quindlen, bestselling author of She Drives Me Crazy. Perfect for fans of Lex Croucher and Laura Kay.

When Louisa unexpectedly inherits a struggling gay bar from her late great-uncle, she’s determined to keep it open for the vibrant queer community that calls it home.

Louisa’s mission puts her on a collision course with Aubrey: the pretty, popular, and sharp-tongued daughter of their college town's newly crowned football coach. The girls start off on the wrong foot, but a tentative truce leads to a growing spark . . .

Things threaten to sputter out when the bar faces an existential threat from Aubrey’s dad, who plans to turn it into a sports facility.

How much is Louisa willing to lose in the fight for her new found family?

Netgalley readers raved about This Must Be the Place . . .'joyful, tearful, tender, conquering delight '