This is the kind of history book I enjoy reading: it's about a niche, focused topic that is interesting to me. I have always wondered how LGBTQ were able to live and love in a time when there was more persecution. This book offers us a glimpse of that reality.

This was one of my random requests to NetGalley for a book that simply sounded unusual and original, even though patently one about a topic that I might not be expected to be interested in. But I love to explore the byways of history and this book turned out to be both fascinating and illuminating. It explores the experiences of gay and lesbian people in the prairies of Canada between 1930 and 1985, not an area of the country I would have associated with the LGBTQ community. Delving into the available archives and relying heavily on oral histories, the author brings the era and the people alive, and it’s a well-written and painstakingly researched social history of a time and place. I found it a bit heavy-going at times, as it is undoubtedly an academic text, but I enjoyed the anecdotes and personal histories contained within, and certainly had my horizons broadened.

Prairie Fairies is a well-written and fascinating look at queer life in the praries.I'll be the first to admit that I never would have considered what queer life would be like in the prarie provinces. In my mind, people who were queer would end up migrating toward the largest cities that they could find.

What Prarie Fairies does so well is it breathes life into what could very easily become dull. Korinek took me by the hand and led me into a time and place I couldn't even begin to wrap my head around.

It's a great read and I can't recommend it enough, but please be wary that it's a bit dense at times. I would be absolutely hooked one moment and then struggling for a few pages before picking up my momentum again.

This was a very thorough and interesting history of Canada's Prairie queer communities. While there was some bi-erasure I am not quite sure if people during the time period would have known how to express that (IE sources) so I am unsure if it was the author leaving stuff out or if there was a lack of sources or... Otherwise, I really enjoyed learning about these obscure (to me) communities in Canada.

I also really enjoyed that the author included non-white groups in the book such as First Nations and Metis. That was really cool to read as these groups tend to be left out the most in history.

A well-written, empathetic, and fascinating account of lesbian and gay citizens of Canada's prairie provinces. While there is some bi erasure in this book, it is otherwise strong in documentation of queer history in both the large cities and smaller rural towns of these provinces, taking into account First Nations, Metis, and colonizer politics and relationships; the problems of identity that persist in dividing LGBTTQIAA+ communities; and the difficulty of finding individuals willing to share their memories and histories with the public. Prairie Fairies is an important addition not only to the body of work on queer history, but to Canadian history as a whole, and offers new avenues of research for scholars to pursue further.