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emleemay 's review for:
All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages
by Saundra Mitchell
Rosa was a summer girl, and I was a winter girl, but that fall we made magic.
You know, back when I was in my early teens, I once heard this old guy say “there weren’t all these queers around when I was younger”. Oh, but there were, sir. And long long before that, too.
[b:All Out|35140599|All Out The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages|Saundra Mitchell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1514494195s/35140599.jpg|53278915] is a great fictional companion to last year's [b:Queer, There and Everywhere|35046241|Queer, There and Everywhere 23 People Who Changed the World|Sarah Prager|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1493677118s/35046241.jpg|50463455]. While the latter works to uncover the real queer - gay, bi, trans, genderqueer, nonconforming, intersex, asexual - people who have been erased throughout history, [b:All Out|35140599|All Out The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages|Saundra Mitchell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1514494195s/35140599.jpg|53278915] is a collection of fictional stories that puts queer people into the Middle Ages, Victorian era, Gold Rush-era and more, where of course they were all along.
Most of these are adventure stories with positive representation. Adversity does rear its head, and some of the stories are a little bloody and unfair, but they nearly all leave us with a sense of hope. Though romance is a common theme throughout, not all the stories are love stories. The authors explore young adults coming to understand and accept themselves, or others, and some who still haven't quite worked it out.
"All I'm saying," said Vince, "is we don't need to have ourselves figured out in one night. You know?"
The anthology begins and ends with two of my favourites, each with especially lush, evocative writing. [a:Anna-Marie McLemore|6434877|Anna-Marie McLemore|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1516319453p2/6434877.jpg] retells Red Riding Hood with a transgender spin and a 19th-century Mexican setting. As expected from the author of [b:When the Moon Was Ours: A Novel|34964957|When the Moon Was Ours|Anna-Marie McLemore|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1516375193s/34964957.jpg|48249481], the writing is gorgeous and the story beautifully-imagined. The last story is by an author I was previously unfamiliar with - [a:Tehlor Kay Mejia|16305520|Tehlor Kay Mejia|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1517803467p2/16305520.jpg] - and she writes a dreamy gay romance between two women in 1930s New Mexico.
I also particularly enjoyed [a:Elliot Wake|15254487|Elliot Wake|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1480863996p2/15254487.jpg]'s "Every Shade of Red" about a transgender Robin Hood, and "The Inferno & the Butterfly" by [a:Shaun David Hutchinson|3130410|Shaun David Hutchinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1387295428p2/3130410.jpg] in which two gay magicians' assistants fall in love, though all of the stories had something important to offer. [a:Nilah Magruder|8349969|Nilah Magruder|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1448441766p2/8349969.jpg]'s "And They Don’t Kiss at the End", about a black teenager coming to terms with her asexuality, was another highlight.
If anything, I wish the stories could have been a bit more geographically diverse. The vast majority take place in the United States, and there are no stories set outside of North America and Europe. This is not a criticism of any individual story, but rather what I would have liked to see from the anthology as a whole. Still, with so much great writing and imagination in one collection, it is difficult to complain too much.
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