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I received this book in exchange for an honest review.

Michael Nelmark’s Under the Rainbow is a young adult LGBT fantasy novel that I would rate as 3.5 stars. It is written in action tense and starts off quite dark and depressing and after struggling through the first few chapters, the novel becomes captivating and causes one to be unable to put the novel down. It is about a young teen, Blake, who is sent to a correctional summer program to fix homosexual teens and keeps them in the program until they are “rehabilitated”. He meets several characters who exemplify the struggles and horrors these young teens whom have been written off by their parents because of their sexual orientation. We meet a young gay couple who goes against the strictures of the camp and try to be together despite this institute. We meet Wesley who, Blake tries to befriend but tries to escape the ostracism of the camp through suicide. We meet Tyler whom Blake is slightly attracted to.
The novel picks up after the suicide of Wesley and the disappearance of Blake’s gay couple cabin mates. Blake attempts to run away and Trent tries to help him. In their attempt to escape, Blake falls off a cliff and into a river. This near drowning experiences cause Blake to nearly pass on. This is the start of the fantasy novel.
Blake enters an alternative universe – an afterlife to be exact. He meets an old schoolmate, Ashley, of homosexual orientation, who warns him to run and escape if he wants to survive. We follow our protagonist through his escape, rescue and understanding of where he is and what he is. He is known as a “Half Life”, one of the rare whom has not yet died but experienced a near death experience. As one of the “Half Life”s, he has the chance to return to the living world and special powers that may help to defeat the White Queen. The White Queen is a personification of all the rigid strictures and prejudice non-heterosexuals faced in the living world. The White Queen hated all those who did not follow her beliefs and all those that were different in sexual orientation. Those souls that were this afterlife Blake found himself in were either petrified by the White Queen or forced into her army of “Blessed” or joined her elite forces called the “Virtues”.
Blake meets and slowly builds his understanding and thereby empowers himself as he meets other residents of the “Dark Side of the Rainbow” such as Dorothy, a transsexual, Vincent, Tyler, Eleanor, Wesley – the young boy who committed suicide but has no recollection of Blake or the camp. The world in which they find themselves is shaded in that of a rainbow – ROY G BIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Everything in each section is shaded in shades of its main color – everything in Red is in shades of red; in orange, everything is in shades of orange, and so forth. I found the author to be very allegorical with the title “Under the Rainbow” as the souls here find themselves as citizens in purgatory in the “Dark Side of the Rainbow” using underground tunnels to travel through the rainbow-ed worlds. The only things lacking color were items and individuals who have been petrified by the White Queen into depressing gray.
I found the novel enlivened by interjections from the characters which mirrored thoughts that went through my mind as I read such as when another character refers to the protagonist as one of the “stupid people” just as I was thinking goodness this character is so stupid – get with the program!
By the end of the Blake’s time in the Dark Side of the Rainbow, as a reader, you become so proud of the growth and success of the protagonist. Blake completes his purpose in the psychedelic afterlife and returns to his injured body only to find himself still a ward of the summer camp to be sent onto their main institute. At the time Blake was placed into the summer camp, he was never aware that it was more than a summer’s duration. To find himself revived and still to be put back into a prejudiced institution without even the ability to see his parents after his near death experience was a very heavy blow. Along comes Trent who continues to work on an escape plan for him and Blake after their first escape attempt. There is still hope for freedom after all.
There were several grammatical errors I spotted which threw me off my reading experience and my understanding of the story. I would’ve given this story 4 starts, but please forgive my pointing the errors out, but they proved to be a huge detraction from such a lovely story.