Classic fantasy, including revisited fairy tales, can be a charming genre, or it can go very wrong. Fortunately Mardoll generally charms.

You could say that these are fantasy/fairy tales with a queer theme… or you could say that they are classic fantasy/fairy tales that happen to have unexpected gender details. For the most part I would say the latter, with the bonus that those unexpected details may turn out to be critical to the happy endings – once we work them out. I also never realized how very many times pronouns appear in casual fiction – until suddenly they were unfamiliar or semi-familiar neopronouns. That was definitely an eye-opener.

My favorites are probably Tangled Nets and The Wish-Giver. I found Early to Rise to be the least compelling.

While these stories were written FOR the LGBTQIA+ community, they can also be immensely beneficial to, and enjoyed by, cisgender and/or straight readers. As with other kinds of fiction, these stories allow us briefly to inhabit selves other than our own. As at least one of Mardoll’s characters observes (and I’ve long thought), one doesn’t have to understand something to acknowledge its truth. There are truths here that many of us have never encountered before, and these stories are a charming way to meet them.