Tales from Beyond the Rainbow, collected and adapted by Pete Jordi Wood

Fairy tales, by their original oral natures, are often retold, with variations, and they are often reworked with different ideologies involved. Perhaps the best of such reworkings are the feminist versions by Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber) and Tanith Lee (Red as Blood). In Tales from Beyond the Rainbow, we have ten stories of a slightly different sort: LGBTQ+ tales "proudly reclaimed" by Pete Jodi Wood. What this seems to mean is that Wood has found tales from around the world that might (or might not) reflect same-sex pairings or gender issues, ones that he states are "ripe for reclamation and reinterpretation." In the introduction Wood virtue-signals the claim that he has "tried to stick as closely as possible to the original narratives, while updating the tales for contemporary readers through sensitivity to the depiction of different genders and identities and their pronoun choice, and with an emphasis on the overall positive portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters. I have worked with authenticity readers from around the world..." Despite some notes "About the tales" at the rear of the book, which purport to give the original sources, the reader isn't very convinced by the editor's proclamations. The one tale I knew beforehand is "The Soldier and the Peasant," which comes from the Brothers Grimm, where it ends with two men deciding to live together to share their gold. Should they be read as a same sex couple? Wood thinks so, but that seems a stretch. Another, "The Spinners and the Sorcerer," is feminist but not specifically LGBTQ+. A small format book with spacious type, this volume doesn't amount to much. The polemics of current woke ideas are sometimes hammered into the text, and it makes one wonder how much these examples of woke principals might change over the next decade or longer, perhaps leaving these tales dated and out of fashion. Also, each tale has a couple of illustrations by a different artist ("many from the LGBTQ+ community"), a small headpiece at the beginning, and one full-page illustration, but all are in black and white, which limits the appreciation. Overall, a disappointing book.