Tales from Beyond the Rainbow - Pete Jordi Wood

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆☆
Character Development: n/a
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆

Overall: ⭐⭐

From the cover:

"These are the fairy tales that history forgot - or concealed. Tales in which gender is fluid and where queer stories can have a happy ending. From the humble sailor who finds his handsome prince to the transgender market girl who becomes queen, from Europe to Asia via the African savannah, LGBTQ+ folklore researcher Pete Jordi Wood has combed through generations of history and collected and adapted ten unforgettable stories featuring queer characters."

📚📚📚 

*deep breath*

The thing about this book is, I didn't read closely enough and just kind of assumed that Pete Jordi Wood was heading up the collection of an anthology of updated fairy tales by various authors. Why would I assume that? Because Pete Jordi Wood is white, and many of the stories included in this book come from other cultures, and the subtitle of this book is "Ten LGBTQ+ Folk Stories Proudly Reclaimed" and it seems wild and bold to me to declare a collection of stories from other cultures "proudly reclaimed" because you, a white person, is rewriting them.

Like...was there no way to solicit authors from those cultures to put a new spin on an old folk tale?

It was impossible?

So yeah, that's a little sus to me. Related, not a lot of differences between some of the stories. I know they're based on folklore, so maybe those folktales were virtually identical and that's why the reclaimed, amazing, much better spin was also identical, but this seems like a problem that inviting collaboration from authors of that culture likely would have solved. Just saying. It really didn't help that in addition to being incredibly similar, the writing was also kind of flat. 

And then even beyond all that, what topics did this proudly reclaimed, more queer-inclusive book of "updated" fairy tales feature? Transphobia as the driving plot point, in many of the stories. Bury your gays as the driving trope in at least two of the stories. I suppose it's possible that this is just me, but personally when I'm reading a book called Tales From Beyond the Rainbow that boasts updated stories featuring queer characters, I expect more centering of queer joy and less of exactly the same thing that queer people experience in real life, but make it fantasy! 

Anyhow...I was very excited about this book, checked it out from the public library to read so I could decide if I wanted to buy it for my school library. And I'm glad I did, because no, I will not be adding it to my library. Womp womp.