A review by thatpaintedpony
Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction by Grace L. Dillon

3.0

This was sadly a little middle of the road for me. That's not necessarily because of any weakness of the stories themselves, but more the way this was structured. Because more often than not, these actually weren't short stories, but many of them were excerpts from novels. Which I feel like is not quite the same reading experience as a collection of short stories, and not one I'm specifically fond of. Scenes from a novel are meant to be read as part of a novel, where short stories are designed to be read in isolation. On top of that, I felt like many of these stories were over-explained (possibly necessitated by having so many excerpts that needed context). The introduction to each story seemed to me to be telling me why I should like it, how clever or subversive it was, instead of just letting me enjoy the stories for themselves. As a result, this felt like a bit of a slog. Some of the stories were really good, which is why I gaave it a 3 star rating, but on the whole this wasn't the best reading experience. I think I would have preferred to just read the stories on their own, without the length prologues.