Review: "Dan in Green Gables" by Rey Terciero, illustrated by Claudia Aguirre

Dan in Green Gables by Rey Terciero, illustrated by Claudia Aguirre
Published June 2025 via Penguin Workshop
★★★

Dan's life with his mother hasn't been the most stable thing ever—they're on the road, bouncing from place to place, following his mother's whims. But when she takes him to stay with his late father's parents, everything changes.

This is, of course, a play on Anne of Green Gables, one in which a queer boy in the present-enough day finds a new home in Tennessee. Marilla and Matthew's roles are flipped here: Dan's grandmother welcomes Dan and every part of his identity with open arms, while his grandfather is not really prepared to take in an outsider, much less when that outsider is visibly queer and refuses to bow down to the fire-and-brimstone church minister. I had mixed feelings about that—on the one hand, I don't think it's unrealistic for someone of Dan's grandfather's generation and culture and so on to be quite homophobic (and racist) and to have very specific expectations of boys; on the other hand, it's quite a departure from Marilla's hard-but-mostly-fair attitude.

On the whole this is really thoughtful, with both Dan and many of the characters around him needing to do some growth. I think I would have preferred it as a more standalone book rather than a reimagining of something else, but it was an interesting addition to a subgenre.