A review by tasharobinson
Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap

4.0

These stories, largely urban fables from a Filipino, are dense enough with emotion and incident and sometimes lingual complexities that it took me a while to get into the flow of them, after reading so many airier short stories this year. But they're really rewarding and surprising, a little bit Charles de Lint, a little bit Trese, and a little bit cultural education through folklore. Among all the baby-eating bad girls and reluctant anime-warrior girls and dead girls in the afterlife, my favorite was "A Spell For Foolish Hearts," about a young gay witch-boy in San Francisco who has no idea what love is, even when he falls into it. It feels like a story designed to have fandom yelling at the page, "Just kiss him, you idiot!", and that fandom is going to see the ending coming long before the protagonist does, but the story is so kind and giving, and so full of telling detail about San Francisco and its communities (including the magical one) that it just feels like a comfortable, homey place to rest while waiting for Patrick to wake up and kiss Karl already. This is a really compelling collection full of surprises.