Lewis
Updated a reading goal:
Read 48 books in 2026
Progress so far: 25 / 48 52%
Updated a reading goal:
Read 24 books in 2026
Progress so far: 25 / 24 104%
a book that is hard to describe
The story grabbed me almost immediately; the world building was fascinating and curious, the characters were excellently realized.
The book went in many ways as I expected, but I still felt surprised as it went along.
Genuinely not sure how to describe this other than as a wild subversive retelling of sleeping beauty
a book that is hard to describe
The story grabbed me almost immediately; the world building was fascinating and curious, the characters were excellently realized.
The book went in many ways as I expected, but I still felt surprised as it went along.
Genuinely not sure how to describe this other than as a wild subversive retelling of sleeping beauty
I’m in a bookclub that reads speculative fiction short story anthologies, and this is our most recent read. Like any anthology, it has stories I liked more and stories I liked less, but in terms of the anthologies our book club has read, this is one of the stronger entries overall.
Stories I particularly liked include:
All That Touches the Air (An Owomoyela)
A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i (Alaya Dawn Johnson)
A Song For You (Jennifer Marie Brissett)
Tender (Sofia Samatar)
Shape-Ups at Delilah’s (Rion Amilcar Scott)
The Orb (Tara Campbell)
I will be thinking about the An Owomoyela and Alaya Dawn Johnson stories for a long time. The former does a nice job of depicting someone with prejudice/fear of alienness developing and interrogating their own outlook, without seeming too pat about how that improvement might look, while the latter was a genuinely inventive and compelling variant on vampire stories.
I want to go back and re-read Tender, because I know I missed a lot of what was going on in it on my first read, but even what I did get out of it was satisfying.
Shape-Ups at Delilah’s shows how to take an existing story/myth/etc. and reinvent it, rather than simply doing a palette swap on the setting and characters.
The entries that I resonated with least were Bludgeon (it is hard to get me to care about sports, and this one really needed me to care about sports), Calendar Girls (this felt like a premise in search of a plot, and what plot it did have didn’t quite make sense to me), The Ones Who Stay and Fight (which either doesn’t understand Omelas, or takes a response to it that I think is pretty misguided), and We Travel the Spaceways (which felt exploitative of homelessness and mental illness).
Overall I would recommend this collection.
I’m in a bookclub that reads speculative fiction short story anthologies, and this is our most recent read. Like any anthology, it has stories I liked more and stories I liked less, but in terms of the anthologies our book club has read, this is one of the stronger entries overall.
Stories I particularly liked include:
All That Touches the Air (An Owomoyela)
A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i (Alaya Dawn Johnson)
A Song For You (Jennifer Marie Brissett)
Tender (Sofia Samatar)
Shape-Ups at Delilah’s (Rion Amilcar Scott)
The Orb (Tara Campbell)
I will be thinking about the An Owomoyela and Alaya Dawn Johnson stories for a long time. The former does a nice job of depicting someone with prejudice/fear of alienness developing and interrogating their own outlook, without seeming too pat about how that improvement might look, while the latter was a genuinely inventive and compelling variant on vampire stories.
I want to go back and re-read Tender, because I know I missed a lot of what was going on in it on my first read, but even what I did get out of it was satisfying.
Shape-Ups at Delilah’s shows how to take an existing story/myth/etc. and reinvent it, rather than simply doing a palette swap on the setting and characters.
The entries that I resonated with least were Bludgeon (it is hard to get me to care about sports, and this one really needed me to care about sports), Calendar Girls (this felt like a premise in search of a plot, and what plot it did have didn’t quite make sense to me), The Ones Who Stay and Fight (which either doesn’t understand Omelas, or takes a response to it that I think is pretty misguided), and We Travel the Spaceways (which felt exploitative of homelessness and mental illness).
Overall I would recommend this collection.
