A review by court_bee
Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories by GennaRose Nethercott

dark emotional mysterious reflective

4.0

• Sundown: 2.5 Stars - This one seems to be a favourite for most readers but it isn't really to my taste. I can appreciate the execution of the metaphor but I prefer when weird/fever-dream like stories are less modern and have a little more whimsy.
• Abecedarian: 3.5 Stars - I would recommend the first two stories for fans of Mona Awad, if you combined the writing and tone of 'Sundown at the Eternal Staircase' with the concept of 'The Diviner's Abecedarian' you get 'Bunny' vibes 100%. (Friendship, Obsession, Clique , Coven, Occult). Telling this story through vignettes and structuring it alphabetically was very interesting and unique.
• Thread Boy: 5 Stars - The imagery of the thread as representation for relationships, experiences and emotions was beyond beautiful. This was the Fairy-tale/Folklore style writing I was hoping for.
• Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: 4 Stars - My favourite beast: SPARK PANTHER,
  'The Spark Panther can outrun its own soul-faster than the human eye, faster than sound, faster than its sorry prey. Its ghost, not so quick, topples out of its body into the dust. Soulless, the Spark Panther is a vicious hunter. It will rend the larynx from an antelope without remorse. It will gather enough meat to last several months, and then it will feast. Meanwhile, its soul begins the journey back to its host. If the soul arrives too quickly, before the Panther has had time to feed, the creature will be so overcome with guilt at the sight of its slaughtered prey that it will be unable to eat. It will paw at the mournful earth, burying the bodies, its belly empty.'
• The Lily is a Lily: 4.75 Stars - This one was a very close, second favourite in the collection after Thread Boy.
• A Haunted Calendar: 2.25 Stars - The structure was a fun idea but the one sentence stories did nothing for me, was very obviously filler.