Long before the term “queer” took on its current reference to sexuality and sexual preference, it had a broader meaning: anything “odd,” “curious,” or slightly “off”—as in not conforming to mainstream expectations. In this sense, Mennonites in North America have been a “queer” people for centuries, a “queerness” they have often attempted to mitigate as the “quiet in the land” (96). This “queerness” had nothing to do with sexuality but stemmed from Mennonites’ refusal to cooperate with military conscription and infant baptism in Reformation Europe. This biblically based ethical stance set them apart from Christians who believed church and state were one, and earned them persecution and martyrdom—eventually prompting them to flee to more tolerant situations in the American colonies, the United States, Catherine the Great’s Russia, Canada, Brazil, and Paraguay.As immigrants to countries that protected their religious liberty, Mennonites gained some acceptance as a productive and hardworking agricultural people who kept mostly to themselves. To preserve a peaceful difference from their neighbors, Mennonites have tended to demand conformity among members to specific standards of Christian discipleship. Until the summer of 2022, the denomination did not officially sanction membership by gay or lesbian people; due to the activism of its LGBTQ constituents in such organizations as “Pink Menno” and authors such as Cruz, the denomination has been shaken and challenged. The title of Cruz’s book invites further provocation in the relatively recent field of Mennonite literary study.Daniel Cruz, son of Mennonite missionaries to the Bronx and a Latinx literary scholar of “queer” texts, grew up in a Mennonite context that admitted of diversity and hybridity. In this book he plays with the term “queer” and its full range of meanings to draw parallels between Mennonite cultural representation and queer literary production. As Cruz states in his introduction, “The queer in ‘queer theory’ is not just about sexual orientation; it is about how one views the world, using the act of queering to question basic assumptions such as the male/female binary in service of an antihegemonic world view” (3). By yoking together the terms “queer” and “Mennonite,” Cruz makes an original and provocative argument as he draws parallels between the formation and structure of queer and Mennonite communities and their literary production.A minority community, seeking to create its own narrative history, will invest in creating archives of materials to instantiate that history. At the time of World War II, when the historic peace churches worked out an alternative service arrangement with the US government, the Mennonite Church also established its archives and intensified efforts to record a denominational history and articulate a theology of Christian community. Cruz’s book is a parallel attempt to establish an archive, a canon, for queer Mennonite writers and to integrate their work into the Mennonite literary archive in progress.Cruz’s method in this book is deliberately queer, combining scholarship with a strategically intimate first-person narrative, reader-response theory, and a methodology that regards the novels he studies as sources of theory. Cruz’s detailed knowledge of the development of Mennonite literature and literary study over the past thirty years, along with his intimate familiarity with queer theory, undergirds and reinforces his commitment to activism and a hybrid approach.Cruz focuses on three common elements of both Mennonite and queer groups in their search for historical and practical validity: archives, activism, and the search for community. His analysis rests on an in-depth exploration of seven novels and two short-story collections by Canadian and US writers published between 2008 and 2017: The Widows of HamiltonHouse by Christine Penner; The Wes Funk Story by Wes Funk; Somewhere Else by Jan Guenther Braun; Shaken in the Water by Jessica Penner; Boneyard by Stephen Beachy; Husk by Corey Redekop; Riding Sidesaddle by Miriam Suzanne; A Safe Girlto Love by Casey Plett; and Tender by Sofia Samatar. Cruz’s is the first in-depth critical treatment of some of these works; Queering Mennonite Literature is their first appearance in conversation with each other. This grouping expresses a range of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, hybrid, and postcolonial perspectives whose forms range across realism, the gothic, fantasy, and self-reflexive postmodernism.The role of the archive is explored in the work of Christina Penner and Wes Funk, as fundamental to creating both agency for queer writers and queer community. Ruth, the protagonist of The Widows of Hamilton House, is an archivist and collector; the house that she inhabits dramatizes the importance of an archive not only as a collection of materials, but as a space. In Funk’s Wes Side Story genre bending self-documentation becomes a method of queer archiving. Cruz’s account of collecting Funk’s work also speaks to the fragility of queer Mennonite literary production that relies on small presses and various types of self-publishing with limited and transitory warehousing and distribution, underscoring the need for a scholarly archive to document and preserve its existence.Themes of identity and archive intersect in Braun’s coming-of-age novel Somewhere Else. The protagonist, Jess, discovers a stash of lesbian poems by a Mennonite woman in her father’s papers, demonstrating that a legacy of queer literature indeed exists—although hidden—in her cultural legacy. She takes the collection with her as she runs away to Winnipeg. Ultimately, this poet, Martha Wiens, becomes the subject of Jess’s MA thesis, and her pursuit of this literary connection leads her back from “somewhere else” to find her “own queer voice by investigating her hybrid self” in her home community (60). Thus, the narrative arc of this novel differs from earlier works of Mennonite literature, such as Gordon Friesen’s The Flamethrowers (1932), in which the protagonist rejects the community in favor of a broader world, however devoid of meaning. Jess’s departure initiates a circle of return and re-integration, at least partly through her relationship with another woman of Mennonite heritage, as well as by a literal homecoming in which she claims her lesbian identity in a Mennonite setting. The novel culminates in what Cruz views as “activism”—a reimagining of a future that is both shaped by and inclusive of its queer members.In boneyard Stephen Beachy creates an elaborate narrative framework that suggests a queer legacy even as it questions the truth-value of archived material. Cruz links his analysis of boneyard with a bold reinterpretation of The Martyr’s Mirror, the seventeenth-century ancestor of Mennonite literature, embedded in Beachy’s text. Cruz’s analysis takes a creative turn as he investigates Beachy’s use of The Martyr’s Mirror as a covertly erotic Mennonite text. Probing the parallels between abuse and martyrdom, between pacifism and submission, Cruz argues for the redemptive possibilities of BDSM because it is a consensual activity in which the submissive partner is in control. Cruz’s analysis of Corey Redekop’s Husk, which features a Mennonite zombie, likewise, highlights the ethics of the body and the paradox of pacifism when survival depends on the sacrifice of another’s life (or brains).The book’s final chapters widen out to consider both transgender literature and queer postcolonial literature in works that cross genre borders and gender boundaries in provocative ways: Casey Plett’s Lambda Award–wining collection of short fiction, A Safe Girl to Love; Miriam Suzanne’s novel-in-a-box Riding Sidesaddle; and Sofia Samatar’s collection of speculative short fiction, Tender. Considered together, these works enlarge our collective sense of possibility—reimagining the world in a way that is refreshingly inclusive and quirky and “queer”—calling us to account for our own complacency in upholding conventional categories that limit our thinking.My first impulse on reading Queering Mennonite Literature was to order all the books Cruz mentions that I hadn’t yet read, despite being a scholar of Mennonite literature. Thus, this book humbled me as it guided me through the equivalent of an in-depth course on queer literature and theory. Just the act of reading this book engaged me in the kind of activism Cruz’s subtitle suggests: by adding to my archive of queer and Mennonite literature, it reconfigured my sense of the archive and initiated me into an expanded community of readers. For this, I am grateful. Cruz’s work will not the last word on the subject, but it is a fearless beginning that invites, with its provocations and suggestive assertions, more conversations.