Bee’s fraught and complicated relationship with fellow counsellor Ben is only more troubled by something that happened last summer. Sisters Bee and Hana have grown up together at the camp their parents own, and one summer all the simmering romantic tensions come to a head. The actions shifts from an idyllic island to an idyllic summer camp, but all the misunderstandings and farces are kept. The story maximises on the potential darkness of growing older, and also explores Peter’s relationship to masculinity as a trans man. His old band of Lost Boys are now men too, and Peter is feeling an inescapable pull towards his old antagonist, Captain Hook. More of a sequel than a complete retelling, Peter Darling allows Peter Pan to return to Neverland as an adult, after having grown up with Wendy in the real world. There is death, and underhanded bargaining, and all of the hauntings we might expect from a Macbeth adaptation – but there are also Characters of Colour, and a lesbian relationship at the centre of it all. Robin Talley takes the much-studied story of murder and megalomania to an exclusive private school, with power couple Maria and Lily thirsting after the Cawdor Kingsley scholarship and willing to go to any lengths to secure the futures they dream of. It’s the excitement of getting to experience a well-loved trope, in a way which feels personalised and inviting. It feels good to get excited about storylines which could otherwise be stale. Books like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel, and the upcoming graphic novel Check, Please! make use of romcom tropes which are somehow new and surprising when the characters aren’t straight. LGBT rom coms are just as exciting on the page as they are on the screen. If the reception of Love, Simon tells us anything about queer narratives, it may be that the community is ready for old tricks done by a new dog. They are the same classic stories we’re used to, in a fresh and more relatable package. LGBT fairytale retellings – and other types of LGBT book retellings, for that matter – can give us something we’ve always been missing. And authors rewriting the tales as old as time are doing more than just zhuzhing them up a bit. A gay film version of Romeo and Juliet seems fresh and new. Singers who don’t change pronouns are fighting the good fight, for sure. For a lot of people, the cover is even better if it comes out queer. Sometimes the cover is better than the original.

Gale by Lyssa Chiavari