This is a wonderful mix of folklore, academia and camp. Coward writes in an easy to parse, entertaining style with care and attention to the cultures and indentities he is speaking of.

A real treat to dip in and out of. Am I clever enough to fully appreciate this? Probably not, but I did very much enjoy the experience.

Thank you to Netgalley for the advanced reader copy in exchange for my honest review.
Thoroughly enjoyed this book, it felt interesting and relevant, particularly with the attitudes that feel painfully relevant today. I feel glad to know that queers through times past felt drawn to the strange, beautiful and unusual just like me.

Would flag a couple of tiny errors, such as referencing RTD's episode 'The Star Beast' as the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who when it was actually the 60th. Also mentioning Black Widow acquiring superpowers, when she is a superhero who doesn't have any. These will probably have been fixed by publication but made me aware that there might be similar errors in areas about which I have a less encyclopedic knowledge, so just felt conscious of that as I was reading.

"Queer as Folklore" by Sacha Coward is a delightful romp through fairytales, myth, and legend, uncovering the rainbow history hiding all around us.

Reading it isn't like reading a boring history book I'm University. It feels more like you are sitting with Sacha at a party, and he is geeking out over mermaid lore, the history of pirate marriages, and the mythology of bisexual Greek gods, and you are being swept up in his enthusiasm and passion.

Reading this book was deeply healing as a queer person, realizing how far back and how pervasive our history is. 5 stars!

Queer as Folklore is an nonfiction book about the many ways our different fairytale and folkloric creatures, how they came to life and how they are connected to the identity of queerness, not only in the modern day, but also how these things have always been queer. The book is for people who are interested in the mythology making that happens by everyday folk. This book can be hard to get through with some long pages of nearly academic text, but it does a good job of breaking this up with quotes in block text, pictures, and shorter sections. And it’s not necessarily a book you have to read cover to cover chronologically. None of the monsters require you to have read the one before. I think this is the mark of a good nonfiction book on this subject. While it wasn’t personally my cup of tea, I could see getting this book for someone else.

This book is great if you want an in depth review of queer representation in folklore across the world. I really enjoyed the fact that the lore was not only focused on a Euro-centric history, but rather expanded across many different cultures and countries. There are also a couple of photos, which I love in non-fiction books :).

Fascinating work analyzing folklore with a queer lens! Combined two of my favorite things in a way that was informative AND fun. Coward did an excellent job researching while also maintaining a great sense of humor and not bogging down the reader in too much density.

Thank you Netgalley and Unbound for an arc of this book!

Yet again it's abundantly clear that colonialism is awful.

I really enjoyed reading about how different creatures from folklore are tied to queerness and queer historical figures. Definitely the type of book that I would buy for a queer friend for their coffee table or for casual reading.

I found it a bit difficult to read cover to cover as you would a fiction book, because it is so informative (in a good way), opting instead to jump around to chapters that I found interesting. It's definitely the kind of book you want to read over a period of time to really be able to take it all in.

I enjoyed reading this and getting to learn about various characters in folklore explored through a queer lens. This book was clearly very well-researched and written in an easily digestible way. I also appreciated the inclusion of non-European folklore, and how that relates to perspectives on queerness among different cultures. I did find that near the end, the chapters started to feel a little formulaic, though that is perhaps inevitable with such a book. Regardless, I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in learning about the interconnectedness of queerness and mythology.

I just finished "Queer as Folklore" by Sacha Coward and I'm ready for Pride! This book is vibrant, accessible and fabulous, connecting folklore and LGBTQIP+ narratives in the most engaging way. Expect mermaids, unicorns, faeries AND demons. Coward reclaims and celebrates queer culture through fun and extremely informative (academic level) stories that have been obfuscated for far too long! Although the text might look daunting and dense, Coward does an excellent job of making it fun, well-edited, with commentaries, transcripts, connections between famous figures and folklore (inherent queer) and exquisite images. Each page bursts with fascinating tales and insightful commentary that make you rethink everything you thought you knew about myth and legend. This book is a must-read if you love folklore, myth and queer history. Whenever you go to Pride, look at the references with other eyes.

My thanks to Unbound for providing me with an ARC via NetGalley.

Fabulous menagerie of fact and folklore as the author takes a cheeky romp through myth, legend and fairy tale looking at queer subtext and er actual queer text tbh. Fun, informative and very accessible.

I received this book for free for an honest review from netgalley thank you for the opportunity.

Wonderfully written and I was really surprised by how the book flowed and it was really amazing I highly recommend.

Queer as Folklore by Sacha Coward was a fascinating and well researched read. It was interesting to learn queer history as it relates to myths and fairy tales and this book was hard to put down. Thank you to NetGalley and Unbound for this digital ARC. I will definitely be picking up a physical copy for my shelves in the future.

I got this as an arc on Netgalley and it will come out in August. This is an extremely good, well researched and interesting read. It's a slow read, you need the time to digest the info and think about it.

This book is fantastic, engaging, informative and fun. If you think you know everything about mythology think again because no matter how much you’ve queered stuff in your mind learning this context and history is everything.

This book was a commentary on modern queer culture, an insightful read into queer mythology, and I kept thinking this would be a really great reference for authors or artists to incorporate queer symbolism in their work.

While this book is academic in nature, it does not have an overly academic tone and is definitely intended for a wide, public audience (this makes it very readable!). The book is divided into 5 main parts and while plethora of myths are discussed, it allows for the perfect amount of discussion before moving on to the next piece. It isn't bogged down with unnecessary details and doesn't provide significant background for each myth, but is a really great jumping off point for future research.

Thank you NetGalley and Unbound for the ARC, definitely recommend this one!

I really enjoyed this book! I find Sacha Coward to have an engaging voice and felt that I got to know him a little through the reading of this book.

I enjoyed the deep dive into the folklore creatures and how they can and do fit into the queer experience and frequently have a queer background in its creation. The writing was extremely accessible so if you have no baseline for the folklore or origins of different creatures, you are never left behind. On the other side of that, this may read as a bit introductory to someone who may have a background or education of these stories already, though I would argue that Coward's point of view makes it unique and very readable.

I only had a little struggle with the superhero chapter since I have extreme superhero fatigue, but, that is a personal to me problem, the stories very much fit into the thesis of the book itself.

The end of the book was also really charming and I enjoyed getting to see Coward's breakdown of the why's of using folklore and the supernatural as a way to tell queer stories.

I love this book so much. It is definitely more dense and academic than I had expected, but that isn’t a bad thing. It’s a fascinating read and one that I think I will come back to frequently.

Not what I thought and more academic than expected. If it had the subtitle 'From mythology to the movies' I may not have tried it

Do you like folklore? Find yourself dreaming about faeries, werewolves, and epic hero(ines)? Do you also like gay shit? Queer as Folklore might just be your next non-fiction read if you said yes to any of the above. Coward takes the reader through the history of folklore and myth, relating each of his chosen topics to the typically implicit, sometimes explicit, and/or often unintended connection to queer lives and ways of being. The book is divided into five main parts: first are the magical creatures (mermaids, unicorns, faeries), then the cursed and shapeshifters (werewolves, vampires), third are the occult and supernatural (witches, demons, and the deceased), fourth are the contemporary additions to folklore (aliens, pirates, robots, and superheroes), and finally he ends with a quick discussion on five archetypes that can emerge from folklore and queer intersections.

I'm no stranger to myth and folklore - in my undergraduate, prior to shifting to healthcare, I got degrees in classical studies and religious studies. I have to say, Coward's explanations of various stories, monsters, and mythologies are quite well translated for a non-academic audience. He's clearly ensured the book is well researched without making it inaccessible to the general public - something that is a lot harder for academic-minded folks than many would think it would be! Another thing really I appreciated about the book was how conscientious Coward was in his use of language. From the very beginning of the prologue and introduction he's careful with terms, ensures there are explanatory notes, and provides justification for how he interprets the historical information.

On a critical side, I will admit I was hoping for a more globally focused book. While there are many instances of non-Westernized folklores, these are usually super quick. I found the majority of the focus was on European, European-adjacent, or Classical (Greece, Rome, Egypt) creatures and myths. This isn't a bad thing if that's what you go in expecting, but I unfortunately had the impression of more so it affected my experience. Another comment I'd like to leave in this section is regarding section four - namely, that the modern folklores of aliens and robots seemed like a stretch. While Coward did manage at points to connect these to what an average person would more typically consider "folklore", I feel like these are largely different considerations requiring different analyses and tools. Perhaps a different framing would have been better - for example, instead of focusing on sci-fi-style robots and supplementing with ancient constructs, a better focus may have been to focus on those folkloric constructs and then supplement with the connection to sci-fi content.

Five stars for the premise alone. As a bisexual person who loves fantasy and grew up identifying with mermaids, vampires, etc., this was the book I never knew I needed. Coward provides deep, thoughtful analysis of each of the myths he explores, as well as how the meanings of those myths can differ between segments of the LGBTQ+ community. Despite this complicated task, the author's writing was rarely muddled and confusing, and I was easily able to understand the point Coward was trying to make. I never knew about a lot of the information the author presents, and reading it was affirming and empowering as a queer person.

In addition to the subject matter, I appreciated the way Coward didn't speculate about the sexualities or gender identities of the real-life people he discussed. He stuck to the facts about their lives and didn't deviate from those facts in order to make a point. He acknowledged the different ways these people could have identified, but he didn't cross the line by saying "this person was probably..." etc. He also acknowledged the limitations of his own argument. Rather than strictly providing European examples and saying his argument was the complete literary history of queerness in folklore, as so many authors before him got in trouble for doing, he told readers upfront that his understanding of certain myths/cultures was limited, and he didn't want to risk portraying something wrong and contribute to the erasure many marginalized cultures experience on a regular basis. He did explore certain myths from non-European cultures, but he always did so with imput from those communities.


The first critique I have of this book was that section on werewolves and other shapeshifters got a little convoluted. While the majority of Coward's book was excellently organized, this section wasn't broken up as well as the others, and the various myths he was trying to discuss blended together.

The second critique I had is that Coward didn't explore modern examples when he very easily could have. The most current examples of how folklore positively impacts the queer community, and how the queer community uses folklore to validate their identities, were from the 1980s to the early 2000s. It was very obvious that Coward was writing for a Millennial audience, thus ignoring a lot of potential material. I would have liked to see more about how these myths exist in the present day and how their meaning has changed over time.