Reviews of favorite books

Writing Craft: Dialogue by Robert McKee

6/16/2025

Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen is a comprehensive survey of dialogue techniques with many examples drawn from plays, movies, and literature.
The author defines dialogue as “an outward execution of an inner action. All talk responds to a need, engages a purpose, and performs an action.”
He provides a detailed deconstruction of dialogue elements such as sentence structure, deliberate pauses, the use and misuse of figurative language, how to avoid melodrama, and more.
The author also relates dialogue to other story components such as plot, pacing, and characterization.

To express a character through “verbal action,” the author suggests answering three questions:

What does my character want out of this situation [scene]?
At this precise moment, what action would [s]he take to reach that desire?
What exact words would [s]he use to carry out that action?

The author also explores subtext throughout the book.
“The text of a character’s spoken words conceals her inner life from other characters while at the same time allowing the reader/audience to see through the surface of her behavior."
"… readers and audiences instinctively look past the words to intuit the unsaid, to glimpse what the character actually thinks and feels (subtext) but chooses not to put into words. The writer, therefore, must hone dialogue so that this is possible, so that the unsaid can be sensed by implication.”
"Dialogue should imply, not explain, its subtext."

The author explores several types of dialogue in-depth, analyzing popular media beat by beat to illustrate how the writer constructed their dialogue and the effects they achieved: dramatic conflict (The Sopranos); comic conflict (Frazier); asymmetric conflict (A Raisin in the Sun); indirect conflict (The Great Gatsby); reflexive (inner) conflict (The Museum of Innocence); and minimal Conflict (Lost in Translation).

Some favorite quotes:

Dialogue problems are story problems.
Creativity is choice-making.
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences…
Be judicious in the placement of pauses. Shape the rhythm of scenes without undue hesitation, so that when you put on the brakes, the standstill moment grips attention.
Silence is the ultimate economy of language.
Each verbal expression takes an inner action.
A unique verbal style characterizes each role.
Create honest motivation for behavior.
The problem of melodrama is not over-expression but under-motivation.
To create fresh, original dialogue, set high standards and never settle for the obvious choice.
The more emotional people become, the shorter the words and sentences they use; the more rational people become, the longer the words and sentences they use.
Clarity above all.
Repetition trivializes meaning.
Voice is not a choice, it’s a result [of character].
The stronger the inner scene, the more powerful the dialogue.

The final chapter provides a detailed list of forty-four questions covering topics like scene intention, motivation, subtext, beat progression, tactics, turning points, and characterization. The author suggests writers “Ask and answer these questions on every beat [of your story]. When in the middle of writing the scene’s dialogue, ask and answer these questions again. After you’ve written the scene, ask and answer these questions a third time. The best questions create the best answers.”
Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen provides extensive tools any writer can incorporate to elevate and focus character dialogue.

Other books by Robert McKee: Story, and Character.
For more dialogue tips, read Subtext.

Short Stories: The Way of the Wizard ed. John Joseph Adams

6/14/2025

The Way of the Wizard is a collection of stories featuring sorcery in various forms. The anthology opens with George R.R. Martin’s “In the Lost Lands,” a haunting tale recently made into a movie by the same title. The story originally appeared in the excellent anthology Amazons II.
The opening lines: “You can buy anything you might desire from Gray Alys. But it is better not to.”
A beautiful queen pays Gray Alys to get a werewolf pelt for her—and the queen’s lover pays Alys to fail. The witch agrees to both bargains. I’ll confess I had to Google an explanation of the ending as I’m not great at deciphering subtlety, but the explanation made the story even more satisfying.

“The Magician, the Maid, and Other Stories” by Christie Yant blends the power of fairy tales with romance. A woman stalks the sorcerer who stole her beloved, an aspiring wizard who disappeared when attempting a powerful spell to earn his place as the King’s Magician. The woman is determined to bring her sweetheart home, whatever the cost.
The romance unravels slowly and the ending is completely satisfying~

Krista Hoeppner Leahy pens a tale about one of the men with Odysseus (from the Greek tale The Odyssey), changed into a pig by the sorceress Circe in “Too Fatal a Poison.” The opening line: “Being a pig changed me.”
Throughout the story, the narrator struggles with the simplicity and immediacy of his life as a pig versus his human grief for a deceased friend. The pig-centric passages are immersive: “The smells like fists punching my snout, the pent-up power in my haunches, the ground right there, inches from my chin, begging me to plow it with my snout.”
“Too Fatal a Poison” is a powerful exploration of our animal nature and the pain of mourning.

“Winter Solstice” by Mike Resnik is an interesting take on the Merlin myth. Merlin lives backwards in time, and as he grows younger, his memories of the future fade. The author notes the story was his exploration of Alzheimer's Disease. The closing lines:
“Everything is slipping away, drifting on the wind.
Please, somebody help me.
I’m frightened.”

Kelly Link’s “The Wizards of Perfil” is a great take on sibling rivalry, the devastation of war, and the resiliency of love. A family fleeing ahead of an advancing army is given the opportunity to “sell” one child to the famed Wizards of Perfil. Instead of the obvious choice, the day-dreaming cousin, the nasty older sister is chosen.
She resents every moment of backbreaking chores she performs in the wizard’s service, and worse, begins to have premonitions of impending doom for her family, who are on a train headed west. She’s able to get a message to her dreamy cousin, but he isn’t sure how to get the adults to listen.
During the course of the story, the older sister grows in compassion and comes to embrace her ability to help change the course of the world. The actual identity of the wizards is another memorable element of the story.

Cinda Williams Chima offers a compelling story of an enslaved enchantress working for a trader in magical artifacts in “The Trader and the Slave.” When a wizard arrives looking to barter a powerful artifact, the trader orders the enchantress to seduce and poison him—but the wizard sees through the scheme.
The enchantress’s emotional journey through resentment, fear, revulsion, and hope is the most powerful element of the story.

Vylar Kaftan’s “The Orange-Tree Sacrifice” is an intense exploration of spiritual sacrifice with echoes of Indigenous North American Sun Dance ceremonies.
A peasant girl hangs suspended and dying, surrounded by eleven wizard lords waiting eagerly to use her death to fuel their magic. The men, bored and complaining of sore backs from sitting so long, try to hurry the process by torturing her, but the girl has made a vow of service to her goddess—who has her own plans. The brutal yet transformative story is only two pages long, but resonated long after I finished reading it.

“One-Click Banishment” by Jeremiah Tolbert equates computer code with magic. The story is told through online posts by a character who uses sprogs (spells + programs) to work his magic. Things go awry when the cyber-security authorities arrest him then draft him to fight a demon who is stealing souls through an online user agreement clause. It’s delightfully clever and the ending is a hoot.

There are thirty-two stories total in The Way of the Wizard. I enjoyed the anthology as a whole, but few of the stories were as impactful as those I highlighted in this review. Still worth the read and grateful my library had the book to lend.

Other worthy short story anthologies:
The Best of World SF, The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, Best New Romantic Fantasy

Fiction: Someone You Can Build a Next In by John Wisell

6/6/2025

A delightful fantasy-horror, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, follows the misadventures of Shesheshen, an earnest shape-shifting monster who falls in love with a human woman.
In Shesheshen’s world, love means planting your eggs within your beloved so your young can devour the carcass from the inside out. But Shesheshan quickly realizes humans have very different ideas about love—and eating her new girlfriend Homily isn’t an option, no matter how delicious she smells.
Shesheshen decides to confess her true nature to Homily, but before she can, Homily reveals she’s part of a family bound to hunt and destroy Shesheshen to end their family curse.

Monster hunters routinely track and try to kill Shesheshen, which she finds rude and irritating. A pair of monster-killers come to her lair in the book’s opening, awakening her early from her annual hibernation, and the stakes rise from there.
Shesheshen’s shapeshifting is the most unusual aspect of the novel; she can incorporate anything she consumes into her body: chain, metal rods, bone, flesh, organs.

Here she is awakening from hibernation: “Along the floor of the bathing room lay iron rods and dense stones, which she’d left out last season. She rolled across them, letting them cut through external layers of her flesh with a sting that felt like waking up. Her innards squeezed these rod and stones, aligning them into a loose skeletal structure. A steel chain once used to bind her now made an excellent spinal column, flexible without breaking when catapults lobbed debris at her.”
Her consumption of the hunters who accost her is visceral without being gory: “He had the chest of a man who exercises for sport, which made for pleasant chewing. His marrow was unusually sweet, and his bones hard against her orifices. Sturdy bones scratched pleasantly against her insides, and she squeezed them into alignment so she could hold new shapes.”

Throughout the story, Shesheshan’s unique voice and perspective on the world provides much of the zany comedy:

“For some reason, clutching at clothing was a classic human sign of being pathetic.”
“I was going badly enough. It might as well go badly on horseback.”
“People like that had the most delicious-tasting heads.”
“Homily’s [bed]room was everything Shesheshen didn’t like about people. A bed larger than any human’s surface area, and the sheets were so tight across it that you would have to wrestle to get under them. Mirrors hung on the walls, to trick you into thinking you were company. Dressers and bureaus to encourage people to change clothes more frequently than made sense. Bedrooms were made out of bad habits.”
“It was much nicer tonight than last night, and not just because Shesheshen wasn't dying of poison this time.”
“She was going to eat her mother-in-law for the common good.”
“From what she knew of civilization, all children were parasites. You were supposed to grow to like that about them.

While trying to pass as a human woman, Shesheshen falls in love with kind and caring Homily, then unhappily develops a strange organ in the center of her chest that aches whenever Homily is unhappy.
“Companionship. That was civilization's trap and snare. And Shesheshen had stepped right into it.”
Things get more complicated when she learns Homily is trying to kill the local “monster”. Then Shesheshen meets Homily’s dysfunctional family. It soon becomes apparent that Homily is abused emotionally and physically by her family, and has compensated by learning to be overly giving. Shesheshen tries to support Homily without rescuing her, and at the same time avoid being discovered and slaughtered by her family.

The most audacious character is Homily’s mother, the Baroness. She has led many successful military campaigns and brags about slaughtering Shesheshen’s mother years ago. She rules her family with an iron will and is cruel and dismissive of Homily, while idolizing Homily’s siblings.
The Baroness’s backstory is revealed late in the novel: it wasn't a surprise to me, but it set off a madcap scramble to kill the “monster” creating a wild ride up until the thrilling conclusion.
Some readers have taken exception to Shesheshen’s therapy-like insights into Homily’s trauma and family drama, and there were times the author used the characters as advocates, but overall the insights into how people respond to and process trauma added to the complexity of the novel. The denouement was a sweet wrap-up providing a happy ending for our main characters.
Read Someone You Can Build a Nest In for a cozy horror-fantasy with a unique “monster” who proves to be very human. Nominated for the 2025 Nebula and Hugo awards.

Other books with brave characters overcoming traumatic situations:
Four Profound Weaves, Light from Uncommon Stars, Nettle & Bone,
A Taste of Gold and Iron, The Bruising of Qilwa, The Queens of Innis Lear,
A Closed and Common Orbit, Dead Country, A Sorceress Comes to Call

Nonfiction: Disfigured by Amanda Leduc

6/3/2025

Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space explores Western cultural messages about disability and otherness. The author was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and underwent several surgeries as a young child. She uses those experiences (and her continued awkward walking pattern) as a lens to explore how fairy tales affected her identity as a disabled person.
The author’s personal struggles with her disability are interwoven with insightful analysis of the cultural role of fairy tales and stories on our collective consciousness.
The book begins with an interesting exploration of the history of fairy tales themselves. The Grimm fairy tales, for example, celebrated a nostalgic “bygone paradise of rural German life.”

The author also gives the historic background of the Disney studios and the “Disneyfication” of popular fairy tales. Disney created “a line of princesses who are at once all different and yet entirely the same—all young, all beautiful.”

The author gives an especially scathing critique of Rapunzel:
“In the seventh edition of the tale [from the Brothers Grimm] . . . Rapunzel tells the prince to come back each time with a skein of silk, which she will weave into a ladder. It is endlessly interesting to me that the prince doesn't come back with his own rope, ready to rescue the maiden—nor does he alert his kingdom to her captivity and come charging to the tower army in hand. She is better in the tower—contained, special. As long as she’s in the tower, she exists just for him.”

Some of the other stories explored in the book:

“Hans My Hedgehog,” about an adventurous half-hedgehog boy who sheds his otherness and transforms into a handsome man once he marries a princess.
In “The Maiden without Hands” a miller makes a bargain with the Devil and barters away his daughter. Rather than go with the Devil, the maiden chops off her own hands. After some misadventures, a king falls in love with her and makes her silver hands. Then the Devil interferes and she is cast out while the king is away at war. The king eventually finds her again. “The queen’s hands have grown back in the interim, as hands in fairy tales are wont to do if you pray hard enough.”
“The Little Mermaid” makes a bad bargain because of her desperate desire to transform herself for love, and gives up her voice to get legs. Says the author: “Ariel gained her legs by magic. I gained my legs by the less romantic practicalities of orthopedic surgery.”
Regarding “Beauty and the Beast,” the author asks if the Beast “isn’t made precisely as terrible as he is as a result of the world’s reaction to his disfigurement?”

The author explains how many of these fairy tales are based on ableism: “a system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, and excellence.”

In all of these stories transformation happens to the protagonist, not society. In fairy tales, “we support and perpetuate a culture where the emphasis is on the cure rather than societal change—where the aim of the narrative is to eradicate the disabled life rather than change the world so that the disabled life can thrive.”
The author delves into her personal history with disability relative to these pervasive stories:
“When you are taught from the time you are a young child that the disabled body is weak and other, set apart, you partake in a world that seeks to entrench this otherness through systemic and cultural barriers. You participate in a culture, even unknowingly, that furthers disabled exclusion.”

The author explores several models of disability:

The social model says disability is “maintained by systemic barriers, exclusion, and negative attitude toward these disabilities more than the physical limitations or conditions themselves.” Buildings with ramps and elevators don’t create the same barriers as those with steep stairs.
The medical model sees disability as an individual defect that “must be cured or eliminated if the person is to achieve full capacity as a human being.” This is based on the belief that there is only one “right” way to move or be in the world.
The charity model “depicts disabled people as victims of circumstance who are deserving of pity” and “as long as individual charities and charitable actions exist to make gestures toward those who are less fortunate, there is less need for . . . sweeping societal change.”

The book closes with a manifesto asking for new fairy tales, such as the “queen in a wheelchair marries no one because she doesn’t need to marry to show that her life brims with joy.”
She goes on: “Give me stories where disability is synonymous with a different way of seeing the world and a recognition that the world can itself grow as a result of this viewpoint.”
The author invites the world to “start telling different stories about a body that might just look like mine, and reshaping the world to fit them. I am already enough. There is no need to be more.”

Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space provides a comprehensive overview of Western fairy tales and the messages they convey about disability, personal transformation, and cultural norms. Thank you to my local library for this fabulous read!

For more insights on ableism and disability, read Disability Visibility,
Disability Intimacy, and Being Seen

Fiction: Behind the Throne by K.B. Wagers

5/28/2025

Behind the Throne tells the story of criminal gunrunner Cresson Stone, a.k.a. Princess Hailimi “Hail” Bristol, who is forcibly brought home to become the empire’s heir after her sisters are murdered. We experience Hail’s devotion to her deceased sisters in real time and through short flashbacks. Her mourning for her sisters, and her dead lover from her gun-running days, gives her character depth and nuance.
Hail is a foul-mouthed rebel who wants nothing to do with her stern empress-mother or the viperous imperial court. But she’s forced to assume the role of heir to discover who murdered her sisters—and to keep her vicious cousin Ganda off the throne.

Cousin Ganda is deliciously backhanded, taking every opportunity to advance herself at Hail’s expense, an old dynamic between them: Ganda does everything right publicly and is widely admired, but is cruel and vindictive towards Hail in private, using Hail’s temper against her.

Hail vigorously resists being squeezed back into her old role of princess, a fun reversal of the usual fish-out-of-water story. She’s savvy, insightful, and worldly-wise from her days out in the far reaches of the galaxy, but often too hot headed for her own good. It’s fun to watch her learn to rein in her temper over the course of the story.
The bonded pair of men who tracked her down to her gunship are assigned as Hail’s bodyguards. Emmory is the most intriguing of the pair: a man of exceptional skill who can also match Hail’s snark with ease. His partner, Zin, is the more even tempered of the two, but also a lethal killer. Hail’s evolving relationship with Emmory and Zin forms the emotional spine of the story, and it’s a delight to watch their mutual trust and teamwork develop.

The multi-planet empire is a matrilineal society (inheritance through the mother) many generations removed from India, but with many of the Hindu gods and rituals handed down across millennia. Hail has an affinity for the elephant god Ganesh, and he plays an important role in guiding and comforting her throughout the novel’s challenges.

Another intriguing element of the novel is the dynamic between Hail and her mother, the empress. Her mother has been diagnosed with dementia, creating a time crunch for Hail to garner support as heir, and the strained history between these two fascinates.
The empress sees Hail as ungrateful, rebellious, and unfit for the throne—but her only remaining blood heir—and she's determined to force Hail to fulfill her duties correctly.

Hail slides back into her old role of a whiny, unsatisfied teenager whenever she’s around her mother. Though they have little time together in the book, the author makes every moment count. It’s a treat to see the two women slowly come to respect and understand each other.

The story is full of political intrigue and Hail weathers multiple assassination attempts with the help of her dedicated team of bodyguards.
Meanwhile war is brewing between the empire and an old intergalactic foe.
The plotters who killed her sisters are slowly revealed through multiple twists and turns, but it’s difficult for Hail and her allies to know how deep and extensive the conspiracy is until the climax.
All is revealed in the end, though the actual mastermind and some of the more powerful conspirators escape (to provide a quest for the next book), but there’s enough resolution to provide a satisfying ending to this story.
Behind the Throne isn't a particularly deep science fiction story, but it's a fun read that kept me turning pages until the very end.

Reviews of other fun science fiction books:
Pledging Season; All Systems Red (and sequels); Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (and sequel).
Other fiction inspired by India: The Jasmine Throne and Covenant of Water

Nonfiction: The Art and Science of Connection by Kasley Killam

5/19/2025

The Art and Science of Connection uses scientific studies to illustrate the many ways social health improves our physical, mental, and emotional well being. For example: “Connection in various forms is linked to a range of benefits for the body, including a stronger immune system, lower risk of disease, and greater overall health.” And, “having close relationships seems to be as important as exercising and not smoking when it comes to maintaining our cognitive abilities as we age.”
Conversely, a lack of social connection is detrimental to our health:
“you are two to three times more likely to die in the next decade if your relationships are lacking, regardless of your other health habits.”

The author provides self-assessment tools to explore different relationship styles: frequent versus infrequent interaction; casual versus intense connection. Mine: “You thrive on infrequent interaction and deep connection.”
She also provides multiple strategies for improving our social health. For example, someone who feels stretched too thin may need to rest and ease back on socializing. Someone content with their social networks may focus on sustaining or deepening these bonds. She asks, “Is your overall social health strategy to increase your number of [social] sources, maintain or reduce your number of sources, deepen your connections, sustain your connections, or a mix of these?"

The book touches on the “loneliness epidemic” afflicting a growing number of people around the modern world. The pain of loneliness is very real: “We literally feel physical pain alongside the emotional pain of not belonging, of being cast out by peers.” This reminds me of the television show Survivor, where people are voted off the island—which I find too excruciating to watch!
The author says, “loneliness is like hunger: a message to your brain that it needs something it’s not getting.” The antidote is developing healthy social relationships. Because “Loneliness is often a self-focused internal experience[;] If you feel lonely, volunteering can be an especially helpful approach.”

One exercise called the Curiosity Game can help build or deepen relationships by asking provocative questions, such as:

What is something you were afraid of when you were younger, that you’re no longer afraid of today?
What is a big risk you took that has paid off?
What are you most excited about these days?
Who was the biggest influence on you when you were growing up?

Beware, engaging in vulnerable conversation requires discretion: “opening up has to be done selectively and thoughtfully with people who are trustworthy and at moments that are appropriate.”

Another helpful skill is “intentional guesting: the act of choosing whether, why, and how one attends a gathering.” For example, when you receive an invitation, are you excited? Filled with dread? “This should help you identify whether that relationship, community, or activity is generally nourishing or draining to your social health.” And whether or not you want to attend this particular event at this time.

The author spends the last third of the book discussing ways to create a global social health movement, and argues that not all cultures are amenable to fostering social health:
“In general, people tend to prioritize independence and self-sufficiency in cultures that value the individual, as in the US and Australia, whereas people tend to prioritize interdependence and group harmony in cultures that value the collective, as in Brazil and India.”
This part of the book was less engaging for me than the earlier sections focused on individual social health, though I did enjoy her examples of places around the world working on fostering stronger communities.

The author’s takeaway message: “You do have to make relationships a priority, experiment with strengthening your social muscles, and build community where you live, work, and play.”
The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health Is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier provides the tools to achieve this social well-being.

Other books you may also enjoy: Supercommunicators and Say the Right Thing

Short Stories: Kissing the Witch by Emma Donaghue

5/12/2025

Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins is a collection of fairy tales that transform the original stories into entirely new narratives. The stories are connected by a causal thread, with each successive tale serving as backstory to the preceding one.
There are some typical hallmarks of fairy tales: talking animals, magical transformations, enchantment. Yet the stories are also grounded in realism, so that they feel both ancient and contemporary, timeless and timely.
The fairy tales they’re based on are recognizable in most cases; others are less familiar—but it hardly matters since these stories stand on their own as compelling narratives of female resourcefulness and agency. And each story takes the narrative in unexpected directions creating a delightful reading experience.

The book begins with a retelling of Cinderella which begins with this opening line: “Till she came it was all cold.”
  We meet a young woman grieving for her mother and haunted by “shrill voices” inside her head driving her to sweep and clean the empty house. Then a stranger who knew her mother arrives and things change.
  “My old dusty self was spun new. This woman sheathed me in blue velvet. I was dancing on points of clear glass.”
  Cinderella asks to attend the ball:
  “Isn’t that what girls are meant to ask for?”
  When the prince proposes, she has a completely unforeseen—but absolutely perfect—response that reshapes the tale entirely.

“The Tale of the Bird” juxtaposes themes of safety and freedom. The first line: “When I was young as you are now I learned to save my own life.”
Here we meet a young wife whose husband insists on keeping her “safe” by trapping her inside the house when she becomes pregnant.
One day she finds a swallow near death who flew in the chimney. She nurses the bird back to health. “I could have kept it beside me, a silk-tethered plaything, but what would have been the use of that? I took it to the highest window in the house and let it out.”

I especially enjoyed the retelling of Snow White. She and her stepmother are initially close and it is the king who teasingly introduces a competition between them by asking, “How am I to judge between two such beauties?”
When the king dies, the queen asks Snow White to swear fealty, but instead she runs away: “I decided to leave it all to her, and leave her to it. I filled my hems with gold pieces and slipped away.”
She meets a gang of woodsmen and becomes their cook and housemaid. When the queen visits her, and Snow White neglects her duties, the woodsmen chastise her and warn her to stay away from the queen. This is ultimately a tale that contrasts how women serve men versus when women create solidarity with each other.

“The Tale of the Spinster” gives “Rumpelstiltskin” a very different outcome.
  A young spinster is subject to her mother’s greed until the mother sickens and dies. On her deathbed, her mother says, “if I have trodden you underfoot it was to wash out the dirt. If I have trampled you, it was to mesh your fibers into something useful.”
  The spinster can’t keep up with the orders after her mother’s death so she hires a simpleton to help. With an employee, the spinster starts flirting with customers and enjoying life. When the simpleton tries to leave, the spinner begs her to stay, offering more and more incentives, until she promises her firstborn child. In the end it is the simpleton who proves wise.

A reimagining of “Sleeping Beauty” hides behind “The Tale of the Needle.” It begins, “When I was the age that you are now, I had never done an hour’s work.”
The narrator is an imperious princess: “The only lesson I had to learn was the list of my virtues: how my face was the fairest, my wit the sharpest, my heart the most angelic, my singing the most comparable to a lark’s in all the land.”
When she enters puberty, she becomes discontented and curious about the castle’s tower where she isn’t allowed. Her parents get her a kitten to distract her, but when the kitten scratches her, they have it drowned. Furious, the princess finds the hidden passageway to the tower and meets an old wise woman who offers to teach her to use a spinning wheel . . .

“The Tale of the Voice” provides insight into “The Little Mermaid,” with a desperate girl longing for a wealthy son’s love: “He stood at the side of his merchant father like an angel come down to earth.”
“The morning after I saw this man in the marketplace I woke up sick to my stomach and decided I was in love.” Desperate, she visits the witch in a cave, demanding to become “a woman he could love.”
The witch says, “Whoever he is, he’s not worth what you’ll pay.” But the girl insists and the witch takes her voice. Later in the story the witch explains, “People never value what they get for free.”

There are thirteen stories total in Kissing the Witch and each has something interesting to say about how women gain power or give it away, and how to navigate the world on one’s own terms. I was disappointed the last story didn't circle around to the first, yet it’s a fascinating collection and well worth a read.

Other short story collections with reimagined fairy tales:
The Starlit Wood, Mythic Journeys, Not a Princess, The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women
Novels based on fairy tale retellings:
Sistersong; The River Has Roots; A Sorceress Comes to Call; Thorn;
Thornhedge; Girl, Serpent, Thorn; The Book of Gothel

Fiction: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

5/8/2025

A Drop of Corruption is an incredible adventure featuring the brilliant and unpredictable investigator Ana Dolabra and her dedicated assistant Dinios “Din” Kol introduced in The Tainted Cup. This time they’re thrust into a jungle coastal town on the outskirts of the empire to unravel a locked-room murder. Ana quickly deduces that they’re dealing with an extraordinary criminal mastermind—who stays several steps ahead of their every move.
Din has left behind the love of his life. He tries to lose himself in sex with strangers to relieve his loneliness. “Afterward: when all was spent, and the shuddering grew still, and the sweaty limbs atop my own grew cool. Only then could I hold them and make the world small [and] controllable.”

A perpetually mud-covered, tobacco-spitting Apoth guard named Malo becomes Din’s guide and sarcastic sidekick in the investigation. Malo has enhanced hearing, sight and sense of smell, which allows her to track smugglers hiding in the swamps. She’s an absolute delight: a loyal guard, defiant of authority, and protective of the downtrodden, she takes Din to task for being overzealous and getting in her way. She also makes quite a few hilarious jokes about the scent of his “undercarriage” after he’s had sex.

The story highlights the Apothetikal branch of the empire: chemist-geneticists who modify plants, fungi, and insects to heal sickness and suppress contagions.
I enjoyed learning about the various types of apparatus the “Apoths” use in their work: multi-spouted samovar-type pots, ceiling nozzles squirting extracts and oils, and healing nests. Their tools have a steampunk sensibility, but with organic components dominating the “machinery.”
The Apoths also work offshore in the Shroud, a strange half-living structure where they harvest the magical blood of fallen leviathans, the strange sea monsters that come ashore during the wet season.

The leviathan's blood is used to augment individuals with specific skills: for example, Din’s perfect memory. The blood is also synthesized into specific reagents, which are shipped to the heart of the empire via canals dug through the inland swamps. Smugglers routinely try to steal and resell these valuable reagents—and it falls to Malo and her peers to track them down in the muddy swamps.

The murder that Ana and Din investigate was of a Treasury delegate sent by the empire to negotiate with the local nobility—all of whom have terrible teeth. The investigation is full of surprising twists and turns, including witnesses dying before they can divulge critical information, locals who hate Imperials like Ana and Din on principle, and a trail of bodies left by the mastermind killer.
Ana’s final push to solve the case is dazzling and an absolute joy to read. The criminal mastermind gets his just reward, as do his co-conspirators. Even more satisfying is Malo’s probable future in the Imperial Service and the tender bond between Ana and Din.

A Drop of Corruption is a five-star read: the writing is inspired, the characters are complex and fascinating, and there’s plenty of action, intrigue, and pathos.

The first book featuring Ana and Din is The Tainted Cup.
Also by Robert Jackson Bennett: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles.

Short Stories: The Starlit Wood ed. D. Parisien and N. Wolfe

5/3/2025

There are many delights in The Starlit Wood, an anthology of “new” fairy tales, meaning stories with a fresh twist based on traditional tales.
Each story is followed by a note from the author explaining their rationale and personal connection to the fairy tale they chose. I love when anthologies include this as it makes the stories more meaningful.
There are eighteen stories total, and I thoroughly enjoyed all but one (which was too “experimental” and disjointed for me to follow).
I’ve highlighted the stories that stood out for their exquisite writing, delightfully unique storylines, and resonate emotions.

“In The Desert Like a Bone” by Seanan McGuire pairs Little Red Riding Hood with the Coyote Trickster in a desolate Western setting. It’s an atmospheric tale with an empowering view of the protagonist, a young girl apprenticed to Coyote.
The dialogue when she faces her nemesis was a delight:
The knob turns. The door opens.
“You are an arrogant child,” he says, and his breath is whiskey and winter.
“The better to defy you, sir,” she says, and her words are summer in the desert, hot and cruel and unforgiving.

The author said of this tale: “her story is inherently one of betrayal by someone who was trusted, however unwisely, and of attaining adulthood through a single trip through the woods.”

Karen Tidback reworks a disturbingly sexist tale (“Prince Hatt Underground”) into a story of self-confidence in, “Underground.”
Similar to the original fairy tale, a girl (Hedvig) is married to a prince but never allowed to see his face (like the myth of Psyche and Cupid). In this instance, jazz records are the “dowry” paid for Hedvig’s imprisonment underground with her new husband, Lord Ruben, who visits her only in total darkness.
Afraid she's married a monster, Hedvig uses a lighter to view him and he’s stolen away by a scheming countess. Plucky Hedvig sets out to rescue him and in the process comes into her own.

Ruben remains a feckless whiner: “What am I supposed to do?" Ruben asked plaintively.
Hedvig’s reply: “Do better.”

Another great tale is “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar, the author of The River Has Roots. This story combines the fates of a woman who wears iron shoes in the hopes of saving her abusive husband (from the “Black Bull of Norway”) with a princess who is imprisoned atop a glass mountain as a prize for whomever can climb and reach her (“The Glass Mountain”).
Their two narratives converge when the iron-shod woman climbs the glass mountain and befriends the imprisoned princess. Ultimately, the two women rescue each other. The author said of her story: “I treasure the ways in which friendship can undermine the poisonously seductive narratives we sometimes trap ourselves in.”

Garth Nix sets “The Little Matchgirl” in the Old West in his story, “Penny for a Match, Mister.”
In this tale, a portal opens and an ethereal being crosses the Line when a man is killed under the full moon. The dead man’s orphaned sister, who sells matches to earn her living, becomes the instrument of his vengeance. Then a warden-marshal specializing in supernatural crimes arrives and things get very interesting from there.
I loved the author’s characterization of the original oppressive fairy tale in his author note: “It’s Okay to Be Poor and Freeze to Death, at Least You’ll go to Heaven with Granny.”

Kat Howard’s “Reflected” sets “The Snow Queen” in a quantum physics lab. The experiments use a hexagon of mirrors to transport one of the team members, Zack, into another dimension, but the mirrors shatter and they can’t get him back. Then it starts to snow where the mirrors had been and the lab gets colder and colder. The team gets Zack back, but he’s flat and “heartless.” It’s up to the narrator to piece him—and his heart—back together.

“Pearl” by Aliette de Boudard tells the story of a low-level tech, Da Trang, and an automated, self-repairing “remora” who helps him study for his exams to join the upper ranks.
The remora, Pearl, becomes a more-than-friend to him and helps him succeed beyond his wildest dreams. But Pearl becomes disillusioned by Da Trang’s new situation and escapes into the Sun. Everyone assumes she’s been destroyed, but Da Trang can’t let her go. He fashions remora after remora, sending them into the sun to find his beloved Pearl. It’s a bittersweet tale based on a Vietnamese legend with a surprising—and hopeful—ending.

The problem of “Sleeping Beauty,” says author Marjorie Liu, “is that ultimately, it’s a story about a woman who is far more attractive “dead” than alive, a woman who has little agency, who is forced into an unnatural sleep, raped while she is unconscious, and then, when she finally wakes, must go and marry the man who took advantage of her. "

Liu's retelling of this tale, “The Briar and the Rose,” is an evocative and compelling story, and my favorite of the book. Briar is a dark-skinned foreigner and trained duelist who works for an unnaturally beautiful courtesan:
“The duelist could have drawn her sword and removed his head before he even finished [speaking], but she was beyond the age where she needed to prove a point by killing. That had been the way of her youth, but no longer.”
Briar is the only one the courtesan trusts to be with her when she must retire to the tower once a week to sleep. While she sleeps, Rose, whose body the courtesan inhabits, awakens. Briar has fallen in love with Rose and the two women treasure these brief moments together.

Rose hates how the courtesan uses her body to seduce wealthy men and longs to break free.

Briar knows by Rose’s weakening state that the courtesan will soon discard her body for another, younger woman, and Rose will die. The tale becomes a race against time to unravel the mystery of Rose’s imprisonment and find a way to save her before the courtesan kills her and moves on. Rose secretly combs the courtesan’s memories and dreams to find the essential clue they need to unravel her evil magic.
The epilogue delivers a wonderful rumor of two foreign women living on the steppe. One eyewitness claimed: “They held hands even when they rode.”

“Spinning Silver” by Naomi Novik, the last story in the book, turns the “Rumpelstiltskin” tale on its head.

The narrator’s father is a kind-hearted moneylender who never collects what’s owed him. When her mother falls ill, the narrator takes it upon herself to collect from the townsfolk. She’s highly successful, but one day she brags about spinning silver into gold and is overheard by a fairy.
The fairy gives her a bag of silver, demanding she turn it into gold. “For fail me, and to ice you shall go,” the fairy says. In the city, she works with a jeweler to turn the fairy silver into a bracelet and sell it to the duke for a bag of gold. But then the fairy gives her a larger bag and makes the same demand. These are turned into silver rings. With the third bag of silver, the fairy tells her when she turns it into gold he will take her into his wintry fairyland and marry her.

In the end, the resourceful moneylender makes a deal with the fairy worth more to them both than marriage. A truly satisfying ending to the story and to the anthology as a whole.

Reviews of other worthy short story anthologies:
The Best of World SF, The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, Best New Romantic Fantasy

Fiction: Sistersong by Lucy Holland

4/19/2025

Sistersong is an intriguing and magical retelling of the Scottish “Two Sisters” ballad. The story is told through the perspective of three royal siblings:
Rebellious Keyne, who struggles for acceptance and develops a magical bond with the land;
Dutiful Riva, the eldest, who was maimed in a fire and can heal others but not herself;
Vain Sinne, the youngest, who longs for adventure and can (sometimes) foresee the future.
All three are granted their desires for acceptance, healing, and adventure by the end of the book, although not in the manner they expected.

Sibling rivalry drives much of the story’s action: Riva is jealous of Sinne’s easy beauty, Keyne feels judged by rule-bound Riva, and flighty Sinne can’t understand their angst. We also see these three characters struggling to bridge the divide caused by their competing personalities and goals, which heightens the pathos of the story.

Supporting characters include:

Their father the king who has forsaken his bond with the land hoping to lead his people into a more prosperous future;
Their stern mother who encourages a Christian priest for political purposes;
The over-zealous priest who tries to suppress the ancient Pagan practices;
Mori, a wise witch in the woods who rescues Keyne as a child;
Myrdhin [Merlin] the magician who mentors the three siblings;
And a handsome, enigmatic stranger, Tristan, who rescues the eldest Riva when she is lost.

Looming like a dark thundercloud over all of them is the threat of the invading Saxons.

The love story between Riva and Tristan has a lovely beginning when Tristan reveals an uncanny ability to see the beauty within Riva’s mangled body after rescuing her. Riva is ashamed of her deformities from the fire she survived: a clawed hand and lame foot, and she confesses to feeling ugly.
“I’ve seen worse injuries, Riva,” Tristan says. . . . “It isn’t ugly. It’s like a battle scar. And you are no more or less because of it. In fact, I’d say you are more for learning to live with the use of a single hand, where everyone else has two. The world can be an unforgiving place. You must have been strong to weather it.”

Woven throughout the novel are lovely renditions of the land magic Keyne experiences:

“The vole’s tiny voice pops in the dark like bubbles on wash water. And the trees—their voices surround me, a chorus. I can hear the sap beneath their skins, the slow draw of water through roots.”
“I fall to the earth like rain, seep into stone. Beneath its surface is a web branching off into darkness. But where I go, I carry light. I am the water and the rock. I am the blind things that live on the underside of the world. I delve further. I am the ore, the years, the blood, the bones. And as below, I am above.”
But there's danger in merging deeply with the land: it can unravel the soul.

Mori instructs Keyne: “The land supports a million lives and a million deaths. It is bone, seeds, and breath. And it can rip you apart if you’re not careful.”

An early and painful scene has Keyne forcefully stripped of the male clothing he prefers by order of the Christian priest, who considers it improper for a royal “daughter.” Keyne’s emotional trauma is palpable. Though female in his family’s eyes, Keyne knows himself to be male.
Mori gives Keyne an alternative understanding of gender identity, describing the Enaree priests of the Eurasian steppe: “they were Scythian shamans, men who donned feminine dress and did not conform to either sex. . . . And they are not the only ones. The followers of the goddesses Cybele and Astarte are also known to have transcended their given sex.”
These are historically factual statements, woven into the text to provide Keyne support after his humiliating experience of being stripped of his preferred identity.

The author masterfully weaves competing philosophies (Mori and Myrdhin versus the Christian priest) and desires (Riva and Sinne both covet handsome Tristan), without vilifying any one party. We are meant to empathize with the three siblings, but the motivations of their parents and the priest are also made understandable to the reader, adding complexity and depth to the story. And all of the characters are flawed humans who must struggle to overcome their own shortcomings, especially with the Saxon army advancing toward their homeland.
When the Saxons do arrive, Keyne provides a clear-eyed view of the horrors of war: “Father’s warriors always seemed eager for battle. They talked of glory, of honor. But there is nothing glorious about this. There is no honor to be found in a man’s spilled guts.”

In the story’s climax, all three siblings draw upon their magical abilities to bring about the story’s thoroughly satisfying resolution and reaffirm their deep love for each other.
As Sinne says,
“Because we are not so very different, he [Keyne] and Riva and I, and our bonds are as strong as the land.”

Sistersong is a five-star read for the complex characters, depth of storytelling, and wondrous magical elements. Highly Recommended.

For another version of the Two Sisters ballad, read my review of The River Has Roots;
Find more powerful land magic in another five-star book, The Queens of Innis Lear;
for more gender-bending magic, try The Four Profound Weaves or The Bruising of Qilwa.

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