Reviews tagging 'Abandonment'

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 by N.K. Jemisin, John Joseph Adams

1 review

angorarabbit's review

adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective relaxing sad tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

 TLDR: An excellent collection to introduce a reader to science fiction and fantasy without trying to commit them to a series of eleven books. Or to find more authors for your own tbr list. 

 

A collection of 20 stories by 19 authors is hard to review so I’m not trying very hard to do so. As you would expect these are very good stories. As a bonus you not only find 19 authors to explore but the editors also list the other notable stories so you can fill your tbr to overflowing and possibly freak the heck out of Goodreads. If that is not enough to keep you reading through a few more pandemics they also list periodicals that you can check out. 

 

Out of the twenty 12 were 5 stars, 6 were 4 stars, one 3 star and one 2 star thus an overall rating of 4.25. The five stars were so good and so many of the 4 stars could have been 5 stars on a different day that it is hard to pick favourites without listing half the stories. However I will mention Maria Dahvana Headley had two stories both of which were excellent and Samuel R Delaney also had an excellent short story (he’s 82 now so I am happy anytime I see something new from him). 

 

The the story that really confused me as to why it was in the selection was The Resident. I missed anything resembling fantasy or science fiction in it. If pushed to place it in a genre I would have said it had some elements of everyday horror. I probably would have rated it higher if I had read it in a collection of literary fiction but here it was just meh. Maybe I missed something? 

 

The only downside to me was this was by its inception limited to Canadian and USain authors. Just think how many books would be added to my tbr with a collection like this with authors from any country whose published stories had been translated into English in 2017? 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal death, Body horror, Child death, Death, Genocide, Misogyny, Sexual content, Transphobia, Forced institutionalization, Xenophobia, Cannibalism, Abandonment, and War

Moderate: Gun violence, Mass/school shootings, and Death of parent

Minor: Fire/Fire injury and Alcohol

Content warnings pertain to specific stories. I apologise for not having the spoons to list stories and warnings separately. The sexual content is only in the first story which is still very good even if you chose to skip the spicy stuff.