As you might guess from the title, author Kit Rosewater’s latest young adult book, Buried Feelings, was inspired by treasure hunts. It’s a fascinating and compelling story about where and how treasure hunting intersects with queer history and queer community.

Rosewater’s inspiration came from a book she was obsessed with as a young reader. Masquerade by Kit Williams, was read to her third grade class by her teacher. 

“I became utterly obsessed with the book for one simple reason: the treasure within the story was actually real,” Rosewater explains. “In 1979, Williams buried a golden necklace, then hid the clues to its whereabouts in Masquerade. Though the necklace had been found well before I ever came across the book, I was transfixed by a treasure story that gave so much weight and gravitas to its actual treasure.” 

Buried Feelings was her opportunity to pay homage to history that she holds dear—that of queer heroes and communities in the United States.

The book is “a story of a treasure hunt set within San Francisco that sees its characters uncovering the history of the wider queer community that rose together and took shape in the Bay Area after World War II,” Rosewater explains. “The book started from my childhood love of treasure hunts, but has ended in the most cliché way possible, as I realized that researching and discovering this queer history was the real treasure all along.”

Uncovering and celebrating queer history—or as Rosewater calls it, taking “an archeological journey through the glimmering facets of queer representation and queer community rooted in various times and places”— has been an emerging and welcomed theme in a number of YA books over the last year. 

🌈 You can check out more about Rosewater’s book, as well as three of her picks for excellent YA queer history novels, in this piece. – KJ