Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature (University of Michigan: 2011) is the first collection of essays devoted to LGBTQ children’s and young adult literature. Edited by Michelle Ann Abate, associate professor of English at Hollins University, and Kenneth Kidd, associate professor of English at the University of Florida, the collection gathers 17 articles by other English and literature professors into a fascinating, if academic, volume.
If words like “semiotics,” “textuality,” “revisionist,” “trope,” and “performative” make you run screaming from memories of college literature classes, this probably isn’t the book for you. If, however, you are willing to brave a bit of jargon or are an actual literature geek (and I know some of you are), you will find much food for thought here.
The volume includes three sections: “Queering the Canon,” which reexamines with a queer eye classic or historical works; “After Stonewall,” which looks at post-1969 books more explicitly about lesbian and gay issues; and “Queer Readers and Writers,” which asks whether the term “queer” is a useful definition and what it means to “read queer” or “write queer.”
Essays investigate works with clear LGBTQ content, such as Alex Sanchez’ Rainbow Boys, Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind, and Lesléa Newman’s Heather Has Two Mommies, but also look at less explicitly queer books ranging from the Nancy Drew, Harry Potter, and Oz series to Harriet the Spy, Little Women
The focus is primarily on young adult literature. Books for younger children get short shrift, except for one essay on Heather and Too Far Away to Touch, a later work by Newman. That is a shame, because there is certainly a small but growing number of works for the elementary school set—and while their length and simple storylines may not lend themselves to deep literary analysis, I believe that they can still teach us much about changing perceptions of LGBTQ people, both within and outside the LGBTQ community.
The editors say, “We hope with this volume to encourage a more dynamic relationship between queer theory and children’s literature studies.” Time will tell if they have succeeded, but they have made an excellent start.
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