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A review by lukre
Upon a Once Time by Anna Fagundes Martino, M. Regan, Suri Parmar, Anna Madden, Jamie Lackey, Kit Falbo, Joshua Gage, Dennis Mombauer, Brent Baldwin, C.J. Dotson, Nike Sulway, Lin Darrow, Maya Chhabra, Mike Morgan, Rebecca E. Treasure, Melissa Mead, N.A. Sulway, Evan Dicken, Cat Rambo, Taryn Haas, Alex Langer, Jude Reid
2.0
Thanks to NetGalley and Air and Nothingness Press for the ARC
I don't mind fairy tale retellings in general, but I didn't like this one.
It was just too muddled up for me. The fact that they combined multiple tales in one story was bad enough, but then you add multiply styles/genres, and all you get is a story that doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up.
There are two or three that are good, or at least better than the rest. The golem retelling and the Cinderella retelling are not bad. The golem is combined with the beauty and the beast story, with the rabbi’s daughter teaching golem how to be a human, and the Cinderella being a “what happens after the happily ever after” story. I liked those. But again, these suffered from an ailment that is typical for poor short stories – it was incomplete. I felt that if the authors of these stories had been given more room to work, the stories would have been better.
All in all, a muddle and a mess. Not a book for me, I’m sorry to say.
Two stars because there were some pearls among the rest of it.
I don't mind fairy tale retellings in general, but I didn't like this one.
It was just too muddled up for me. The fact that they combined multiple tales in one story was bad enough, but then you add multiply styles/genres, and all you get is a story that doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up.
There are two or three that are good, or at least better than the rest. The golem retelling and the Cinderella retelling are not bad. The golem is combined with the beauty and the beast story, with the rabbi’s daughter teaching golem how to be a human, and the Cinderella being a “what happens after the happily ever after” story. I liked those. But again, these suffered from an ailment that is typical for poor short stories – it was incomplete. I felt that if the authors of these stories had been given more room to work, the stories would have been better.
All in all, a muddle and a mess. Not a book for me, I’m sorry to say.
Two stars because there were some pearls among the rest of it.