Kaleidoscope - An anthology of diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy stories (with about half the stories featuring QUILTBAG characters) where diversity isn't the main issue

Kaleidoscope, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios.


Here are the stories with LGBTQ characters and themes:

“Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon” by Ken Liu is set in China during a lovers’ festival, and features a lesbian couple who share one last magical night before one of them goes to boarding school overseas.

“The Legend Trap” by Sean Williams is set in a future when teleportation is an everyday thing. Three teen friends (one is the son of two dads, and the other two are a lesbian couple) discover a portal to a parallel universe.

“The Day the God Died” by Alena McNamara shows us a genderqueer/genderquestioning teen who meets a dying god.

“Signature” by Faith Mudge features a gay supporting character who works in a bookstore with our disabled Desi protagonist—unfortunately that bookstore is in a lot of trouble due to a magical contract that the workers have signed.

“The Lovely Duckling” by Tim Susman is about a transgendered teen who wants to go to shapeshifting school to learn how to take the form of a Condor.

“Kiss and Kiss and Kiss and Tell” by E.C. Myers has a bisexual protagonist who can see the future when she kisses people.

“Celebration” by Sean Eads sends one gay teen to a conversion therapy camp, but things turn out to be even more sinister than they first appear when aliens turn up on the scene.

“Every Little Thing” by Holly Kench has a protagonist who is disabled and queer, and also a spellcaster.

“Happy Go Lucky” by Garth Nix is set in a dystopian future where everyone is tested for their luck value and placed in a rigid class system. Jean has always assumed she’d be lucky for life, but when one of her fathers displeases the government and the family’s class is reassigned, she has to find a way to turn her bad luck around.

“Ordinary Things” by Vylar Kaftan has a bi protagonist who is reeling from a bad breakup and finds strength in small rituals.



The editors wrote this about the project:

We wanted to fill a book with stories about all kinds of teens who don’t often get the spotlight in stories. Roughly half of the stories feature QUILTBAG characters, but intersectionality is important to us, too, so in several cases the characters might be diverse in other ways, too. Most of all we wanted to have a book of stories where the race, gender, sexuality, and ability of the characters wasn’t the main issue, though. In Kaleidoscope, some of the stories are happy and some of the stories are sad, but all of them are about more than just the labels we might be able to apply to the main characters.

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