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A review by andipants
All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages by Saundra Mitchell
3.0
I'm not really a big short story fan, but I got sucked in by the promise of queer! and historical! and not explicitly fantasy! And...it was okay. Some of the stories were really cute, some were pretty boring, and there was definitely more fantasy than I signed up for (magical realism is fantasy for people too pretentious to say they like fantasy, don't @ me). I was a little disappointed that there wasn't more diversity in terms of queerness; there are plenty of cis girls who like girls, and cis boys who like boys, plus one (1) trans boy and one (1) ace girl. There aren't any clearly non-monosexual characters (e.g. bi or pan) nor any nonbinary ones, and the lone trans character is not the POV character for his story. For a book bold enough to put "queer" right there on the cover, I was hoping for a little more exploration of the very broad collection of identities contained therein.
As far as the stories themselves, I'm not going to review each one, but I will say they all fell prey to the (very obvious) reason I don't tend to like short stories in the first place: they're not long enough. Short stories are useful for exploring a single character or concept. It's very, very difficult to do more than one of these effectively in a single story. But too often, authors seem to treat them like mini-novels, trying to have multiple characters or too much plot or what have you, and ending up with something that feels rushed and skimpy, or like a single chapter pulled out of context from a longer work that really ought to be put back. To be clear, there is a spectrum of quality represented in this collection, and some of these stories do feel much more focused and polished than others in this regard. But (and this is where it bleeds into personal preference) I personally didn't find any of then totally satisfying. What can I say? I find it hard to fully connect to a character in just a dozen pages.
That's not to say it was a total bust, by any means; some of the stories were very enjoyable. My favorite was Robin Talley's "The Dresser and the Chambermaid", because I love stories about people that usually get forgotten in history, like servants, and I thought the relationship was very sweet. I also really liked the concept of the Robin Hood retelling ("Every Shade of Red" by Elliot Wake), though that was definitely one that I felt should have been a novel. Overall, there were certainly some parts of this that I liked, but it did not make a short- story convert of me.
As far as the stories themselves, I'm not going to review each one, but I will say they all fell prey to the (very obvious) reason I don't tend to like short stories in the first place: they're not long enough. Short stories are useful for exploring a single character or concept. It's very, very difficult to do more than one of these effectively in a single story. But too often, authors seem to treat them like mini-novels, trying to have multiple characters or too much plot or what have you, and ending up with something that feels rushed and skimpy, or like a single chapter pulled out of context from a longer work that really ought to be put back. To be clear, there is a spectrum of quality represented in this collection, and some of these stories do feel much more focused and polished than others in this regard. But (and this is where it bleeds into personal preference) I personally didn't find any of then totally satisfying. What can I say? I find it hard to fully connect to a character in just a dozen pages.
That's not to say it was a total bust, by any means; some of the stories were very enjoyable. My favorite was Robin Talley's "The Dresser and the Chambermaid", because I love stories about people that usually get forgotten in history, like servants, and I thought the relationship was very sweet. I also really liked the concept of the Robin Hood retelling ("Every Shade of Red" by Elliot Wake), though that was definitely one that I felt should have been a novel. Overall, there were certainly some parts of this that I liked, but it did not make a short- story convert of me.