becksusername's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0


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polychromatic_hedgehog_parable's review against another edition

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adventurous dark medium-paced
good stuff
largely forgettable
congrats to Margaret Killjoy for being a really great writer who largely writes about stuff that I don't find very engaging (as opposed to the way too many people who write stuff I find engaging but have clearly never organized so much as a birthday party nor googled USAian history who I find myself barely not rage quitting all the time.)

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booksthatburn's review

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adventurous challenging reflective tense medium-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

5.0

Many of the stories deal with blurred lines between fantasy and reality, where superstition and belief end up with their own kind of practicality. As someone with OCD who struggles with compulsions and magical thinking, these stories were deeply compelling to me. The collection is cohesive in tone while ranging through a variety of settings and many kinds of queerness. They're usually first person narratives, which wholly inhabit a different way of thinking about things in each story, all while remaining extremely accessible and evocative. 

"The Devil Lives Here" is a strong opening to the collection, establishing the overall fever-dream tone and precarious sense of existence which undergirds the rest of the stories. "The Free Orcs of Cascadia" is one of the strangest, most moving stories I’ve read in a while. It’s part narrative, part interview with an orc in a permanent LARP community. It’s a story of fighting against fascism and figuring out what it means to defend the idea of a community as well as the literal people within it. I’ll be thinking about Golfimbul for a long time. I also particularly enjoyed "Everything that Isn't Winter" and “We Who Will Destroy the Future”. Every story gave me several things to ponder, and they shook some unconscious assumptions about the bounds of what could happen in stories, how far the narratives could stretch in such a small space.

I discovered Margaret Killjoy's work through her appearances on Behind the Bastards and other podcasts (she currently hosts Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff). The focus on community and queer anarchism which is an integral part of those shows is fundamental to the stories in this collection, each in their own way. 

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rachbake's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.75

Stunning and queer and gritty and delightful!!

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