A review by bennought
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke

2.0

To be honest, I was pretty disappointed with this book. Clarke's novel, [b:Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell|14201|Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell|Susanna Clarke|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1317066128s/14201.jpg|3921305], was fantastic. This collection of stories, on the other hand, was a bit silly, fairly boring, and generally not at all entertaining in the way that the novel was. A few of the stories, especially towards the end, captured that same flair for wit, humor, and imaginative world-building. The rest were, sadly, just plain boring. And while I love the conceit she has in both works of them being pretended works of non-fiction (in this case, a scholarly collection of contemporary stories regarding fairies, in the other of a historical chronicle), the writing-style of most of these stories, and even the plots and characters themselves, were frustratingly simple and uninteresting. The few stories that did shine, in my opinion, were able to do so because she was writing more in the style of her novel--which is a prosaic, if somewhat 18th century historian style.