Kit

The first chapter of this book is a lot of fun and one where you can tell the author was having a great time, and that sets the tone. Guet Imm, the nun, in particular was easy to fall in love with, and Tet Sang and the rest of his band of roving contractors grew on me as the story progressed.

The plot does take a few chapters to kick off but I enjoyed the time to get to know everyone, and once things start moving it moves at a good clip. I enjoyed discovering the political situation with Guet Imm but there were some other worldbuilding aspects I felt I never got a good grasp on.

I loved the way gender identity was handled in the text — both the day to day and the philosophy of the Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water. It's accepted in its complexity and that was very comforting to read. I also enjoyed the ambiguity in the ending; it brings the character arcs to a resting point but how romantic it is is up to the reader. I really enjoyed the story.

N.K. Jemisin is a master storyteller, and there is a lot to love in this collection. The worldbuilding is vivid even in short glimpses and some of the food descriptions in particular left me hungry. There are definitely worlds I would have loved to see more of; I know “The City Born Great” and “The Narcomancer”  both take place in or are forerunners to two of her duologies (which I am now definitely interested in checking out). And 22 stories is a lot — there were a couple I bounced off of, which is not unexpected with that much variety, and some with more experimental forms.

A few standouts for me personally, not counting the two I've already mentioned:

• “Red Dirt Witch” - One of a couple of historical fantasy tales, that read like an old folktale with choices, belief, and eldritch deals at its center.
• “The Effluent Engine” - Steampunk and intelligence agents, with a world I was super invested in.
• “On the Banks of the River Lex” - Probably my favorite, featuring Death and post apocalyptic gods getting by and The beginnings of something new.
• “Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows” — A time loop of an apocalypse, and musings on connection and disconnection that really worked for me.
• “Saints, Sinners, Dragons, and Haints in the City Beneath Still Waters” -  Just a great endcap to the collection. Modern urban fantasy with a lot of commentary.

A really solid collection of short stories. I enjoyed most of them, and so feel like many of the ones I didn’t enjoy would be by their intended audience — especially since this is a YA collection and while a lot of them wouldn’t be out of place in an adult collection some of them are more high school focused (I don’t say that as a bad thing, but there are a lot of modernizations in this collection!). There were a few I think missed the mark they were aiming for, but I expect some variation in any anthology. I also really enjoyed how many countries and traditions these stories covered, and the author’s notes on the stories they chose to retell.

Some personal highlights:

“Olivia’s Table” by Alyssa Wong, which is a lovely meditation of grief and haunting with a lead character I really felt for. The titular Olivia is cooking for a ghost banquet in an Arizona ghost town, and there’s some fascinating history in that setting.

“The Counting of Vermillion Beads” by Aliette de Bodard, concerning sisters who have been taken as two of the Emperor’s census girls and their separate paths to escape. I love de Bodard’s prose and her characterization of complicated families from her other works, and this is a lovely rewrite of a Vietnamese tale to focus on the sibling dynamic.

“The Smile” by Aisha Saeed, which also had beautiful writing and some good musings on love and possession. I really liked the twist on the original tale here.

“Bullet, Butterfly” by Elsie Chapman, a tale of star-crossed lovers in a war-torn dystopian setting. Gorgeous writing and a really interesting setting to see unfold.

“Eyes Like Candlelight” by Julie Kagawa, which features the two meetings between Takeo, the village headman’s only son, and a kitsune. I really loved the main character and the take on kitsune.

Definitely a book I would recommend to lovers of folktales and short stories.

This is a gorgeously written puzzle of a book, and I really loved the way it all came together. I really enjoyed the frame; and how the empress's story was told not just through Rabbit's remembrance but also through the objects found in her home-in-exile, because all of the little details were so illuminating. You do see the worldbuilding mostly in story form, in this volume, which gives it a kind of fairytale vibe — and those details, like ghosts walking a royal road, women turning into kingfishers, and the subtle dystopia of 50 years of summer — all definitely suit that. It's a story about rage but it's also a eulogy of sorts, and that built up to an ending that had me near tears.

Cleric Chih and Almost Brilliant were fun characters to follow, and I look forward to getting to know them better in future volumes. Definitely recommend.

This is a very quick read and an excellent book, and one that will linger after the last page. I really enjoyed Emezi’s lyrical writing style, and once things got going in the third chapter it moves at a fairly quick pace.

Aside from Pet itself, the magical realism of the setting is a little abstracted and never fully explained, but it blends well with the story’s tone. It handles its sensitive topics in a very age appropriate way (although nothing is explicit, it will be a “mind the trigger warnings” book for many). I also appreciated how the setting played I a very thematic role, how it’s easy to become complacent even (or especially) in a world that prides itself on being better than the one that came before. And I loved the casual diversity in the cast (and Jam being both trans and selectively mute and neither of them being treated as a plot altering thing).

I do wish we’d had a little more from the conclusion, and I don’t know that I will ever reread it, but it is definitely one I recommend reading at least once.