Public Reception
King & King has been reviewed by the School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, the Horn Book Magazine and Publishers Weekly. It earned an Honorable Mention in the "most unusual book of the year" category for Publishers Weekly's 2002 "Off the Cuff Awards." San Francisco Chronicle called the book "progressive" and "inclusive" and The Philadelphia Gay News said it was a "great book to teach young readers about same-sex couples." It was an Inside/Out Book Club selection and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2002.
A program called "No Outsiders," backed by the British Department for Education, used King and King as a teaching tool for introducing students to gay issues, with one of its aims being the prevention of bullying of students who are perceived to be LGBT or who have LGBT parents. The program was inspired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu's remarks, "Everyone is an insider, there are no outsiders — whatever their beliefs, whatever their color, gender or sexuality."
Amy T.Y. Lai's "Waiving the Magic Wand: Forging greater open-mindedness by subverting the conventions of fairy tales" discusses the book in the context of a 2001 Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities article which argues that fairy tales play "an even greater role in shaping lawful behaviour than the recorded law, because it lies at the heart of the children's literary canon and has a much greater claim to universality of influence ... Not only do young children lack the critical faculties necessary to challenge the "truth" offered by these stories, but the jurisprudence of fairy tales maps onto a child's developmental phase of moral reasoning." Lai asserts that King & King is part of a "growing canon of contemporary fairy tales" that challenge traditional doctrines and subvert their ideologies by sidesteping the "trap of prolonging an oppressive punitive system." In this case "by including many unconventional elements - including single motherhood and alternative families - and laying out a gay-positive story with an ending that is gratifying for all parties, but without consciously constructing something like a judicial opinion that imposes a new legal or, worse still, punitive standard upon its reader."
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