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A review by ellemnope
Upon a Once Time by Lin Darrow, Evan Dicken, Jude Reid, Anna Fagundes Martino, Mike Morgan, C.J. Dotson, Taryn Haas, Anna Madden, Melissa Mead, N.A. Sulway, Cat Rambo, Kit Falbo, Rebecca E. Treasure, Maya Chhabra, M. Regan, Jamie Lackey, Brent Baldwin, Nike Sulway, Dennis Mombauer, Joshua Gage, Alex Langer, Suri Parmar
4.0
I love fairy tales and folklore. Retellings are right up my alley. This collection did not disappoint. There are a lot of talented writers who came together in this book and the compilation as a whole was quite fun to read. Short story collections are difficult to find where there is a sort of "flow" from start to end, but this one moved very well. I found myself excited to start each subsequent story.
This was just a wonderful piece of escapism. There is a mix of light and dark, but things are balanced so that the whole book doesn't feel like a black hole. All of the stories were highly creative and wound around a theme of fantasy/sci-fi. There were combinations of various tales and folklore that I found quite interesting to pair and I loved that there were some lesser known tales thrown into the mix with several cultures being represented. The writing was very atmospheric in most cases and a lot of the stories felt like they could easily have been expanded into something bigger. This is the challenge with short stories. The endings are often ambiguous or leave more to be explored. Though this certainly existed within these stories, the majority of them still felt natural as standalone pieces.
Most of the individual stories fell in the 4-5 star range for me. There were a couple that weren't my speed, but these still would've landed pretty solidly in the 3-star range. They all had good writing and the pieces I didn't enjoy as much would likely get higher ratings for those who enjoy their specific subgenres.
This was a really fun read for me and a good reminder that modern short story collections can really be fantastic hidden gems.
* Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. *
This was just a wonderful piece of escapism. There is a mix of light and dark, but things are balanced so that the whole book doesn't feel like a black hole. All of the stories were highly creative and wound around a theme of fantasy/sci-fi. There were combinations of various tales and folklore that I found quite interesting to pair and I loved that there were some lesser known tales thrown into the mix with several cultures being represented. The writing was very atmospheric in most cases and a lot of the stories felt like they could easily have been expanded into something bigger. This is the challenge with short stories. The endings are often ambiguous or leave more to be explored. Though this certainly existed within these stories, the majority of them still felt natural as standalone pieces.
Most of the individual stories fell in the 4-5 star range for me. There were a couple that weren't my speed, but these still would've landed pretty solidly in the 3-star range. They all had good writing and the pieces I didn't enjoy as much would likely get higher ratings for those who enjoy their specific subgenres.
This was a really fun read for me and a good reminder that modern short story collections can really be fantastic hidden gems.
* Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. *