“Unburied Fables” edited by Creative Aces Publishing

It’s another installment of the Great Ace Digital BookBox! As you may know, Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week is in the middle of February, so this selection was done with that in mind. This book is a collection of fairy tales retold with queer characters of many different identities, but most of them are aromantic.

I just really want to highlight that aspect for a second here. It is so rare that you see explicitly aromantic characters in literature. Most stories center around finding your soul mate or whatever and deviations from that are rare in and of themselves. Then to explicitly have a character identify as not about that is so uncommon! But it is so important for people who identify as aromantic to see characters like them. We can forget that, since there are stories about majority cultures all the time. For example, as a white women there are plenty of stories about that aspect of my identity, and I’ll never really know what it’s like to be a woman of color and wanting to see my life on a big screen. But there are other aspects of my identity, asexuality and aromanticism, that are never portrayed in the popular media. And I sometimes forget that those identities are just as important to see. So reading this collection of stories reminded me of that in a very positive way.

Beyond the aro representation, all of the stories feature queer characters. There is one with a trans woman, and most feature gay relationships between men or women. These can be just as important because this is a collection of fairy tales being retold. Fairy tales NEVER include queer relationships, so any addition is super important for those reading.

Now this is a collection of short stories, so the nice thing is that if you don’t like one it’s usually over within 10 pages or so. Usually it backfires with me because I want to know more about the characters but in this case I felt that less often. Possibly because it’s fairy tales, they just live happily ever after at the end.

I think my personal favorites were “Li Chi and the Dragon,” “Match Sticks,” and “The Last Lost Boy.” The first one because it featured a gay lady slaying a dragon and I’m into dragons of any kind (didn’t like that it died but that’s fine). The second because it made a point to highlight loving relationships that weren’t necessarily romantic or monogamous which is soooo important. And the last because it was a wonderful adaptation of Peter Pan into the modern day and also featuring gay boys. But there are many more than that which were a joy to read!

If you haven’t signed up for GAB yet, get on that! It’s so fun getting a new book delivered to your email every month! And in case you can’t tell I have quite enjoyed their selections so far.