By edd tello

A transgender teen wants the quinceañera of her dreams

No Place for Fairy Tales is a short novel in verse that will appeal to a diverse group of readers. I picked it up in my ongoing efforts to read outside the box of the Big Five. It’s from West 44 Books, an imprint of Enslow publications. While readers might be unfamiliar with Enslow, librarians are quite familiar. Libraries are a pretty big market for this publisher. But since No Place is a hi-lo book (a genre that is tough to write for high school teens), I wanted to try it. 

The book cover copy is a very good overview:

“Yuriel’s poor neighborhood in Monterrey, Mexico, isn’t a place where fairy tales happen. Yuriel and his cousin Azul work each day doing laundry to help their family make a living. So when Azul, a trans teen, decides she wants to mark her transition to womanhood with a quinceañera, Yuriel is sure it’s an impossible dream. They don’t have the money, and besides, Azul’s father would never support her transition. But as an openly gay artist in a traditional family, Yuriel sees how important this rite of passage is for Azul. As Yuriel risks everything to play fairy godmother to Azul, he realizes it’s going to take a little bit of magic to pull off this once-in-a-lifetime quinceañera.”

Community is family

In No Place for Fairy Tales, the realization of a dream comes through the community working together to support one another. The obstacles to the dream of a perfect quinceañera, one that is symbolic of public recognition of Azul’s female gender, are community members who only look out for themselves, who are greedy or prejudiced.

High school housekeeping

 Many teens will connect with this short novel in verse (183 pages). The two main characters are a trans girl (soon to celebrate her fifteenth birthday) and her gay cousin (our narrator), an artist who helps envision a beautiful dress. While it’s a quick read with a happy ending, serious issues are embedded: financial stress, parents accepting or not accepting their LGBTQ+ kids as they come out, parent/teen friction, learning the hard lesson of whom to trust and who to avoid, the importance of community. 

I recommend No Place for Fairy Tales for anyone interested in the topics above as well as for reluctant and emerging readers. (The West 44 imprint “offers hi-lo middle grade and YA novels and novels-in-verse for struggling or reluctant readers.”) There are a few Spanish words sprinkled thought the book. Most people who live in areas with Latine residents will know many of these words whether or not they speak Spanish (e.g., pan dulce, chica, mujer, carnicería). However, there is a very brief glossary in the front which lists the words in order of appearance.