sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: short stories

Three mid-length fairy tale retellings in one collection, all very....lightweight and silly. None of them take their own ideas seriously enough and it just results in stories that feel pointless. Some fun ideas but that's all.

The Fairy's Mistake is the story about the girls who get blessed/cursed by a fairy to have gems or toads drop from their mouths, and the cursed girl discovers how to make the best of the pests while the blessed girl is exploited for her resources. It's fun reading about Myrtle having a good time with her new powers, but I really don't like that in the end Rosella and the prince who exploits her for profit end up in a positive relationship, without any evidence that the prince has changed as a person.

The Princess Test is the princess and the pea, and it's about a commoner girl who just happens to be unusually sensitive and thus is bothered by things like peas under mattresses. She seems to both have a lot of allergies and a sensory processing disorder honestly, and possibly dypraxia too! But the story doesn't really engage with that. The story doesn't really engage with much, tbh.

Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep comes closest to working for me. A sleeping beauty retelling wherein one of the fairy gifts is to be 10x smarter than anyone else. Sonora loves learning things and loves telling people about what she's learned or figured out, but everyone finds this terribly tedious. A saying emerges in the kingdom: "Princess Sonora knows, but don't ask her." Her eventual love interest after the 100 year nap is a prince who is eternally curious about things! The two of them will clearly be very happy together. This is all great, EXCEPT that Sonora is so clearly so wrong about so many of the things she says about the way the world works, and it drives me up the wall. And I can't even tell what the author was going for with that. Is it that it's intended to be funny? Or that it's intended to reflect the supposed backwards understanding of ye olde history people? At any rate I don't like it as it feels to me like it undermines the point of the story.

A lovely collection of short stories being sold with all proceeds going to support UCLH Charity's COVID-19 appeal. A thoroughly enjoyable book, with an intention that the stories within are at least somewhat optimistic. Also they're all various flavours of sff. Also a high percentage of queerness. All of which is WHAT I WANT out of a story so YAY.

The stories I loved the most (I HAD FEELINGS) were, in order of appearance:

Storm Story by Llinos Cathryn Thomas, about people working together to survive on a generation ship crossing an endless ocean in search of land

Bethany, Bethany by Lizbeth Myles, about changelings and sisterhood

Seaview on Mars by Katie Rathfelder, about having survived the early hard years of a colony establishing itself on a new world, and how to live in it now that you're old and the colony's thriving

A Hundred and Seventy Storms by Aliette de Bodard, about a spaceship who's a person and her human cousin, doing their best to support each other in difficult circumstances

This is New Gehesran Calling by Rebecca Fraimow, about a diaspora being connected to their community and their identity in various ways via underground radio

My second-favourite stories (still all very good!) were:

Upside the Head by Marissa Lingen, about a concussion researcher with an experimental treatment to help people with post-concussion syndrome recover, and the hockey players who grow in new directions as a result. I felt invested in the concussion researcher and her work, but I felt a bit distant from the experimental subjects.

Four by Freya Marske, about seeing the good in the world and in other people and continuing on, even when there are still bad things that happen, and also about the four horsepeople of the apocalypse. I struggled with remembering names because three different significant characters had names with very similar vibes to me, so I kept getting Felicity and Patricia and Olivia mixed up with each other, which made it challenging to follow. And I was sad that uh Olivia's (I think??? it was Olivia?) story didn't have a happy resolution within the narrative, but the overall feel of the story was still really lovely and great.

St Anselm-by-the-Riverside by Iona Datt Sharma, about an alternate-universe Earth dealing with a Chilling instead of global warming, and a completely different pandemic. A little too close to home for me to be fully into it right now, and I had a brief moment near the beginning where I thought the fantasy plot stuff was going in a COMPLETELY different direction than it actually was and now I secretly want that story instead, but as a story it's still very good despite the things I was bringing to it.

I found The Girls Who Read Austen and Love, Your Flatmate to be just kind of boring to me, I didn't love the (unintentional?) thematic implications of Low Energy Economy that the abject suffering of workers under capitalism is worth it because the work they do allows other people to thrive, and I don't feel like I quite followed enough of the beginning of Of A Female Stranger for the payoff to be successful for me.

So yes, not every story worked for me, because that's just the nature of short story collections, but a very respectable percentage of them did! Sometimes I finish a collection having only felt strongly about a couple stories in it, but this one didn't have that problem. A good collection, very worth reading, and your money goes to a good cause!

Time for the Hugo nominated novelettes! As a whole, I ended up liking the options in this category much more than what was in the short stories this year.

Here's my thoughts on each of the 6 novelettes. I'm listing them in the order for which I will vote for them, top to bottom choices.

Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin

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Omphalos, by Ted Chiang

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The Archronology of Love, by Caroline M. Yoachim

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Away With the Wolves, by Sarah Gailey

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The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye, by Sarah Pinsker

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For He Can Creep, by Siobhan Carroll

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I don't know how many years it's been since I last read this book but it all came back to me, instantly familiar. This is a collection of four short-to-medium-length stories; two are retellings of specific fairy tales and two are inspired by fairy tales.

1. The Stolen Princess - One of the two longer ones. The opening and worldbuilding and scene setting for this story are so so familiar to me, like going to meet an old friend. But I don't really love the actual story McKinley is telling here. The moment we go to the other country, it feels to me like it all falls apart, like McKinley is too caught up in how a story like this "ought" to go to think about what she is writing.

2. The Princess and the Frog - A short but good retelling of the fairy tale, I really like this one!

3. The Hunting of the Hind - All the stories in this book are extremely heterosexual but this one is the worst of the bunch. Come on, there's way more basis for Sellena/Korah than for the two het ships that the narrative apparently intends! And anything about how a woman is SO PRETERNATURALLY BEAUTIFUL that all men who see her fall desperately in love with her is, uh, not my favourite trope (and very heterosexual). Also, the confrontation scene is super anticlimactic.

4. The Twelve Dancing Princesses - An extended retelling in which we discover exactly zero about what any of the princesses think about anything that happens. I mean, the story is more interested in establishing a connection between the soldier and the king than between the soldier and any of the princesses! And there's much focus on the deep sadness of the poor poor king who IMPRISONS HIS DAUGHTERS. Yikes.

In conclusion, I still somehow love this book despite.....only liking one of the stories in it.......... Childhood nostalgia is a powerful force. And McKinley is very good at setting a mood even if I want to argue with just so many of her narrative choices.

I got this book as part of that collection of hand-me-down folk-tale books earlier this year, but this one is not actually folk tales. It's a collection of reminiscences from Inuit elders in the 1970's, reflecting on the different way of life they led when they were younger.

It's a fascinating work, with 11 different elders' stories shared, each with somewhat different perspectives. But even for the people who have some good things to say about the effects of white people on their communities, there is a clear sense of something important that has been lost. And some are fairly strong in their statements of what has been done to them as a people.

One thing I noticed, though, is that nearly all of the elders whose stories are shared in this book are men. I'm not sure if this is because of sexism in the process of collecting/selecting these stories, or whether there was some other factor that led to very few women being able or willing to share, but the end effect is that the book is quite strikingly male-dominated.

A few months ago, I found out that someone I know second-hand was downsizing his books collection and getting rid of more than a hundred folk-and-fairy-tale books. So obviously I took the lot off his hands. Something like half of them I took away to the thrift store immediately because they were clearly poor-quality (culturally appropriative "retellings" by a white person of stories not from their cultural background, for example) or because I already owned a copy. But that still leaves a large pile of books! I don't want them to just molder unread on my shelves forever, so I'm making a stab at reading through all of them, or at least making a start at all of them before deciding if they're worth keeping or not. So here's a first look at three books from the collection I'm keeping. More forthcoming in future reviews, hopefully!

Tales the Elders Told: Ojibway Legends, by Basil H Johnston

A nice little collection of stories, put together by someone who is himself Ojibwe. Enjoyable and quick read. Mostly animal stories, and a number of them are the sort of story explaining why something is the way it is. Originally published by the ROM back in the 80's apparently, which is interesting! I didn't know that was the sort of thing they did. Oyate (which is "a Native organization working to see that our lives and histories are portrayed with honesty and integrity") thinks well of this book, which is nice to hear.

Tales from the Igloo, edited & translated by Maurice Metayer

One of those collections of stories which are traditional to a specific people group but with an editor who is not from that culture, which can be so variable in reliability. This one, which is from the 1970's, says the right things in the preface about being as faithful as possible in translating the stories recorded from the Inuit tellers, but also the foreword and preface contain that uncomfortable mix of trying-really-hard-to-not-be-racist-while-being-obviously-racist. So. Not 100% sure how much I trust this book, but it's definitely at least making an effort? At any rate, I'm interested in how, in this collection, I was so rarely able to predict whether characters would end the story alive or dead, punished or victorious.

Black Folktales, by Julius Lester

This is a book of African American folk stories clearly written by a black person for a primarily black audience, and I respect that. It kind of gentles you in but by halfway into the book it is not messing around with its powerful language and imagery around white-black relations. This is not the kind of folktale book that gets paternalistically handed to white children to teach them about the ~quaint~ ways of other folks. But the author talks in the introduction about how this collection isn't just for black people, it's for everyone, and I appreciate him welcoming me in to hear his stories too.

A Victorian-era book featuring a lady detective! Inspired by

calvinahobbes' long-ago list of recommendations of such. The books on Calvina's list are all among the earliest examples of female detectives written by female authors and I thought it would be fun to give one a try. The first one I tried is the one by Baroness Orczy as that's the only author on the list I recognized, but in retrospect that was the wrong choice because I already know how sexist and classist and antisemitic Orczy is. I gave up on that book by shortly into the second chapter the instant a character was compared to Orczy's usual idea of Jewish people. I don't need to put up with more of that crap. I might love Orczy's most famous book but it is rather in spite of the author, not because of...!

And then I just chose one of the other books on Calvina's public domain lady detective list at random, and came up with this one about Loveday Brooke. And it turned out to be genuinely worth the read. It's is a collection of short stories in which a professional lady detective inspects the details of a case, comes up with the solution much faster than anyone expects, and then explains everything about what was actually going on and how she figured it out when nobody else could.

Each story deliberately hides details from the reader in the first section, such that you wouldn't be able to solve the puzzles along with Loveday. Which I gather is against the rules of "fair play" in detective fiction, but also this book predates those so-called rules so you can't blame the author for it. And it makes for a pleasant read in my opinion because there's none of the stress on the forgetfully-inclined reader of being bothered with keeping track of a million different Clues to try to figure out what details are worth remembering. I also appreciate that most of the mysteries aren't murder mysteries, which also lowers the drama. (Can you tell that I am not the usual audience of mysteries?)

You don't get to see much of the actual character of who Loveday is, unfortunately - the stories are much more interested in showing how clever Loveday is for figuring everything out than portraying her as a well-rounded human, but you know, I can forgive the book that, because it's nice to see a book of its era where a woman's main character trait is Good At Her Job That's Usually Considered Men-Only.

The book does contain undertones of various unfortunate prejudices of the era (like the idea of it being most appropriate to marry within your class), but never in a way that feels actively hateful like Orczy can be, and this book even occasionally refutes certain prejudices, like the idea of a criminal physiognomy.

And the book does a nice job of setting out a collection of interesting characters for each story and a mystery I wanted to know the answer to.

Overall an enjoyable read and the right kind of detective book for a reader like me. Possibly not the sort of book that would be appealing to people whose main reading diet is modern-style mysteries though!

A short collection of stories based on various pieces of fanart for the Temeraire series. I really liked most of the stories, although the drabbles don't do much for me - and they take up like a third of the page count.

But two stories are of particular interest to me: the AU in which Temeraire is a castaway and accidental pirate, and the one about Elizabeth Bennet, Longwing captain. AMAZING. LOVE IT. Although for both of these stories, I'm pretty sure my brain is going to mentally file them as fanfic and then be confused when I can't find bookmarks of them on my pinboard to reread. Oh well.

Back in the days after I'd started keeping a list of all the books I read each year but BEFORE I started posting reviews of them, I kept desultory personal notes (ranging from a single word to quite a few paragraphs) on some of the books. And I always vaguely forget I have, and forget where exactly to find them, and I'd like to just have them on my dw so they're FINDABLE again for me. And also some of you might find these interesting/amusing? (N.B. some of these contain what I would now classify as INCORRECT OPINIONS.)

SO HERE'S THREE YEARS' WORTH OF BOOKS IN ONE POST, OKAY GO.

( expand this cut to see nested cuts listing all the books )

This is a collection of fairy tale-related short stories and poems, many of which T. Kingfisher had earlier posted on her blog as Ursula Vernon. So a number of these stories I'd read before, but some were new to me, and at any rate I don't object to rereading a good short story!

I thoroughly enjoyed the majority of the stories and poems in this book. Kingfisher's just so good at writing stories with emotional impact, striking details, and thoughtfulness. And with both love for and a critical eye towards the fairy tales she's riffing on.

There were only two entries that gave me an "eh" reaction, those being Night and Odd Season. Everything else was really great!

In my opinion the strongest entries were the bluebeard story, the loathly lady story, and the snow white story. And the titular story, Toad Words.

Dang though, I just want to read T. Kingfisher's fairy tale reimaginings forever and now I'm out of ebooks to buy! I hope she writes/publishes more soon.

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/258450.html

Time (...past time) for the latest edition of abandoned books! Here's the books I started in the year 2015 and failed to finish for various reasons, with commentary.

1. Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits, by Robin McKinley & Peter Dickinson
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2. Beat to Quarters (aka The Happy Return), by C.S. Forester
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3. Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope
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4. Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
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5. Fanny Hill
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6. A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Laurence, by John E. Mack
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7. Zahrah the Windseeker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
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8. Busman's Honeymoon, by Dorothy Sayers
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9. Miss Marjoribanks, by Mrs Oliphant
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10. Our Journey to Sinai: A Visit to the Monastery of St Catarina, by Agnes Bensly
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11. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, by Kate Bernstein and S. Bear Bergman
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12. The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, by Simon Winchester
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Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/254691.html

I had a lot of feels, reading this book. I'm not good at feelings so I have no idea WHAT my feels were but I definitely had them. I spent a reasonable portion of the book in tears, but I think in a good way? It's just so - ....reading an entire book by and about two people whose identities don't fit in the gender binary was a really affirming experience, I think. It's like, my experience doesn't exactly line up with either of these two people but it's SO MUCH CLOSER than any other published works I've read in my life. Also Rae and Ivan are both very good writers/storytellers so it was a very good book as well as being a very personally-relevant book. I liked it a LOT.

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/251958.html

Eh, I've read better. I mean for starters the English translation was pretty poor and that made it hard to catch on to what was meant in places. And it's really more a collection of jokes than parables, which is the opposite of what I was hoping. Some of the jokes are funny, some I have no idea what's supposed to be funny despite clearly being intended to be funny, and some I can see what's supposed to be funny but find it supremely unfunny. And there's not enough detail to make it worth much as a look into another culture. I am glad to have learned about Nasreddin being a thing though!

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/250109.html

Oh gosh I was not expecting to be so charmed by this book!! It was written by a feminist in the very early 1900's, and it shows, in the best sorts of ways. The book has a frame tale of Aunt Jane in her older years in the late 19th century having a series of conversations with a young female relative/friend. Aunt Jane tells stories to this young woman about her younger days in small-town rural Kentucky, with lots of focus on the women and their relationships with each other and support of each other. YEAH. (it reminds me a bit of what I liked so much about Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Cranford, actually, though Gaskell is the better writer of the two.)

The first story is the best, and cemented Sally Ann as my favourite character. YOU GO SALLY ANN. But I was impressed by how all the people in this book feel like very real people, and the life of the church Aunt Jane describes feels very true to church life too. (the troubles with the choir, and the one man who's a terrible singer and doesn't know it and loves to sing and loves to contribute! I KNOW THAT MAN.)

The book got a bit boring and meandering in places, especially the last chapter which had WAY too much focus on flower gardens and not enough on people. And the book writes out Aunt Jane's accent, which is unfortunate, though it never gets so heavy as to be unreadable.

So the book isn't perfect, but I love it a lot anyways and I'm super glad I picked it up on a whim.

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/247329.html

This is one of a collection of books called "The Young Folks' Library". I inherited these from my grandparents. They owned the first ten in the series - the internet informs me that rather more than these exist. I really liked these books when I was a kid, or at least those that focused on mythology and fairy tales! Which this one does. It's a collection of fairy tales, and rereading it as an adult I am mostly struck by how all of these tales are chosen and written in such a way as to be extremely moralizing, which is clearly an editorial decision that was made because I've read MANY fairy tale collections that are definitely not as obviously trying to Make A Point to the Young Folks reading them.

Mostly it's just whatever, yeah, that's what you get when reading fairy tale collections curated in a certain era. But I'm particularly mad about one of the stories, "Prince Mu and the Princess Zaza." It involves, as you guess from the title, two young royals. Each is under the particular protection and care of a fairy, and each fairy is pretty fed up with the failings of their royal. Prince Mu is selfish and unthinking, which I will certainly agree is a flaw. Meanwhile the problem with Princess Zaza is that she asks the fairy to take back all the fairy's gifts so that Zaza will know when people treat her well whether that's because of Zaza's personal good qualities or just because of what the fairy's given her. And the fairy considers this vanity, and just as bad a flaw as Mu's terrible selfishness! Meanwhile I'm sitting here thinking that Zaza sounds like the most sensible person in the whole story. Of course by the end of the story both Mu and Zaza have learned their lesson and become better people and have shed their flaws. And have married each other. ZAZA NOOOO YOU DESERVE SOMEONE BETTER THAN MU.

The only other story I really want to talk about is "Felicia and the Pot of Pinks." I have read this story in only two fairy tale collections in my life, this one and one that was intended for even younger children. The two versions of the story are PRETTY DIFFERENT from each other! I gather that the original story of Felicia and the pinks was one that was written by a specific person, not part of a folk tradition, so there really ought to only be one version. And I'm very curious how the original goes. (I've found what seems to be just a straightforward translation of the original online but apparently my brain has decided I'm not allowed to read it until I'm in the right frame of mind to do a proper in-depth comparison of the three versions...)

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/247016.html

Time for my second annual round-up of books I started reading but abandoned before the end! With thoughts of varying lengths to go with each one.

( 1001 Nights vol. 1 translated by Richard Burton )

( Magebane, by Lee Arthur Chane )

( D&D Essentials DM Handbook )

( Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle, by Georgette Heyer )

( Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus by Ched Myers )

( A Glove Shop in Vienna, by Eva Ibbotson )

( The Reverse of the Medal, by Patrick O'Brian )

( Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson )

( Enchanted, by Alethea Kontis )

( Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley )

( The Green Hero: Early Adventures of Finn MacCool, by Bernard Evslin )

( Requiem, by Frances Itani )

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/228619.html

I love Zen Cho's writing so very much. I've been following her stories online for over two years and was delighted to hear that she had a book of short stories being published! I went and preordered immediately. And IT DOES NOT DISAPPOINT. A number of the stories are ones I'd already read online, but a number of them were also new to me. So in some ways it's hard to review this book as a discrete object because it's this mishmash of new to me and old beloveds - it doesn't feel like one book to me as a result. Oh well, that's not a problem, I'll just have to reread it enough that the new-to-me stories become familiar as well.

AT ANY RATE. Zen Cho is Malaysian and she writes sff that is very consciously Malaysian and I love that about it. No generic fantasyland for her - it's all deeply rooted in specifics and feels very real as a result. But also her stories are deeply rooted in character and she is so great at creating characters and relationships between characters that feel true.

And also just - she's a very good writer! Idek what else to say about this collection except RECOMMENDED.

If you want to give Zen Cho a try before committing to an entire book, you can check out her website where she has a number of her stories posted for free. I particularly recommend "The House of Aunts" but all of them are worth reading.

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/220292.html

For a while there I was doing pretty well at giving each book thought its own post, buuuut I have a backlog again so here have a bunch.

( Journey to the River Sea, by Eva Ibbotson )

( The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, by Tom Reiss )

( Handbook for Dragon Slayers, by Merrie Haskell )

( Growing Pains, by Emily Carr )

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/219365.html

Gosh June was a good month for me, quality-of-book wise. The below four are all really great, as were most of the others I read earlier this month! A big contrast with May, which was nearly all books I was pretty meh about.

( The Emperor's Soul, by Brandon Sanderson )

( The Martian, by Andy Weir )

( Warbreaker, by Brandon Sanderson )

( The Book of Small, by Emily Carr )

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/214838.html

Reading multi-author anthologies is always a frustrating experience for me, because of having to reset my expectations at the beginning of every single story. I can't just settle into the book, because the book changes after each story. It's more than just having to settle into a new story, it's about what I should expect about the story given the author. Because different authors are, well, different, and I need to figure out whether I should be prepared to face -isms in the story, and whether it's the sort of story that'll likely end on a hopeful note, and what kinds of things the author thinks are important or interesting to focus on, and so on and so forth. It can get kind of exhausting! Basically it comes down to: do I trust this author to tell me a story I will enjoy? And I HAVE NO IDEA whether to trust the author or not because I don't have any prior experience to draw on!

All of which is to say that I found this anthology, like any multi-author anthology, very uneven. Let me go through story-by-story:

( Mostly no spoilers. Does spoiler the end of one story, Screaming for Fairies )