Review of the Day: Tales From Beyond the Rainbow, collected by Pete Jordi Wood, ill. Various

Tales From Beyond the Rainbow: Ten LGBTQ+ Fairy Tales Proudly Reclaimed
Collected and Adapted by Pete Jordi Wood
Illustrated by Mario Hounkanrin, Anshika Khullar, Nontira Kigle, Ez Silva, Jenn So, Sasha Staicu, Xin Tang, Zat Vornik, Sophia Watts, and Pete Jordi Wood
Penguin Workshop (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
$18.99
ISBN: 9780593889725
Ages 6-12
On shelves now.

I’m a bit of a fairy tale nerd. I come by it honestly. Growing up we had a copy of the marvelous Idries Shah World Tales collection (replete with creations from artists more accustomed to rock record albums than classic folktale accompaniments). Later I’d become a children’s librarian at New York Public Library, where the love of folktales and fairytales runs strong. Their 100 Books for Reading and Sharing List (which I made certain to steal and turn into Evanston Public Library’s 101 Great Books for Kids List) always would include a section dedicated to the year’s best folktales and fairytales. Along the way, I got intrigued by the scholarship surrounding these tales. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim, certainly, as well as newer scholars like Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar, and the like. All this is to say that I’m fairytale scholarship curious but by no means an expert in the field. Enough that when I first saw Tales From Beyond the Rainbow I simply assumed that the book would do something that I’ve seen a couple other collections do before. I thought that Pete Jordi Wood would take already existing tales and give them an LGBTQ+ spin. Nothing wrong with that methodology, of course, but to my infinite delight Pete’s doing something a lot more interesting here. Dedicated to researching world tales, Wood has managed to find and collect stories with positive portrayals of LGBTQ+ people in their original iterations. He then tweaks them slightly, and brings them together in this collection. This isn’t a reimagining. This is a discovery. And for many of us, we’re going into these stories cold for the first time with the wonder, that comes with that discovery, fully intact.

Ten tales. Ten countries. Ten different queer experiences. From a 1925 Benin trans tale of love to a Cape Verde consideration of Catholicism to a Romanian story with some significant similarities to Mulan, these stories are an eclectic and heady mix of the familiar and the entirely unknown. Each story is a classic folktale, be it “Double-Flower Temple” from China, “The Ivory City” from India, or “The Dog and the Sailor” from Denmark. Accompanying these tales (every one given a contemporary spin by Pete Jordi Wood) are illustrations from ten different artists on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. The end result is an expansive and eclectic collection, the likes of which neither the adult nor children’s literary world has ever seen before.

A word on changing folklore. Just as folk music is the music that folks sing, so too are folk tales just the tales folks tell. Notice I don’t say “told”. I say “tell” in the present tense because, and to this day, people can’t get enough of telling these tales. Some have been long forgotten (rightfully so, at times) while others get under our skin. We just can’t stop telling and retelling them over and over to ourselves. What’s the difference, then, when someone like Wood finds folklore and then adapts it to the 21st century? In his words, the stories he found for this book were “ripe for reclamation and reinterpretation.” When possible, he sticks to the original narratives, updating them to reflect contemporary understandings of, “different genders and identities and their pronoun choice.” And to be perfectly honestly, we know that when the folklorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries went around collecting their own tales, they also changed them to reflect their own contemporary social mores. These folks were, “white, able-bodied, rich, and, from what we know, cisgender.” They saw the world through their own lenses. That’s why having someone like Wood, who self-identifies as gay, nonbinary, with a disability, and living in social housing, to collect these stories for us is so invaluable. If not him then whom?

You know how I know that Wood kept as much of the original tales intact as he could? Because some of them are damn weird. I mean it. A true folktale is a weeeeeird folktale. There should be something inside of it that rejects our contemporary assessments of what a story should do. As such, you end up with stuff like the tale “The Spinners and the Sorcerer,” where the heroines burn the baddie and his friends to death in a house fire or “The Ivory City” where a prince brands his beloved because she tried to kill his best friend… and then ends up happily married to her anyway. See THAT’S the kind of stuff I’m talking about! You can try to mold these tales as much as you like, but you also have to let them be a little freaky or they lose their panache.

There’s also the fact that Wood is clearly a folktale nerd in the purest sense. I sort of got a sense of that from the Introduction and then the tales themselves, but then I read his section “About the Tales” where he explains the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index and how similar tales are grouped together as “tale-types”. For example, there’s tale-type number 514 which is the “Shift of Sex” in a story or ATU tale-type number 884B “Girl Who Pretended to Be a Boy”. Acknowledging that even the names of these tale-types are problematic, Wood still peppers his background information on each story and its origins (worry not, he cites his sources like a pro), with plenty of information “For Researchers” who might like to learn more on their own.

All well and good, but isn’t this a book for kids? I’m talking about some pretty darn lofty and academic stuff, but you have to be wondering by this point in the review (or maybe you wondered a long time ago) will children actually enjoy this collection? I think what I failed to mention before is that the packaging of this book is 100% kid-friendly. These could be read on their own by an enterprising 10-year-old, sure thing. But they’re also ideal bedtime stories, perfect for those kids that love romance (I was one of those, back in the day). They read aloud beautifully, and while (as with any collection) some tales are stronger than others (“The Dog and the Sailor” is the last tale and probably my least favorite) overall a child reader or listener expecting the usual tropes of a good tale won’t be disappointed. None of the magic is lost, for all that this book is a folktale nerd’s dream. The pictures, of course, help.

I mentioned earlier my love for World Tales by Idries Shah, and how it was illustrated by this wild array of artists unaccustomed to standard book publishing. This was very much on my mind as I considered the ten LGBTQIA+ artists gathered for this book, each contributing one image per tale. A look at their bios (helpfully included in the back) shows that they’re not children’s literature people. They’re designers, comic artists, printmakers, animators, and more. Not a one of them appears to have ever created so much as a picture book, yet they each believed in this project and gave their own separate spin to how they portrayed the tales. It would have been exceedingly difficult for Wood to have paired each world tale to a queer artist with roots in that specific region, but he pretty much manages it. For example, “The Girl in the Market” from Benin is illustrated by Mariosupa who was born in Benin and raised in Paris. This kind of laserlike focus on the details is part of the reason you enjoy the tales as much as you do. There is care and attention and a level of intentionality on the page that is rare in any collection of world tales, past or present.

At the end of his Introduction, Wood writes, “Although retellings of classic fairy tales with an LGBTQ+ spin have been popular for some time, traditional folktales about LGBTQ+ people are not a contemporary invention. They exist in every corner of the globe.” The trick is in the finding, and aren’t we lucky that Wood did the legwork for us? Moreover, aren’t we lucky that this book has been so careful to employ sensitivity readers, a world view, and an understanding of the limitations of any folklorist, no matter how well-intentioned? Wood says that, “I hope that in the future more collections like this will exist.” I’m just grateful that not only does this collection exist, its intended audience isn’t scholars or curious adults. It’s kids. Particularly, the kids who need to see themselves, or the people they love and know, represented in fairy tales and folk tales. Let us hope that we might make this book such a hit that in the future a new edition is released resplendent in full-color illustrations! Hey, this book came out. That means anything is possible!

On shelves now.

Source: Reviewed from library copy of book.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2025, Review 2025, Reviews