Two More Reviews — A FANTASY MEDLEY Edited by Yanni Kuznia and METAMORPHOSIS by James P. Blaylock
We’ve been overrun with reviews this week. This pair comes straight from Green Man Review.
On A Fantasy Medley (edited by Yanni Kuznia): “A Fantasy Medley is a chapbook that collects four of the major female fantasy authors in publishing today. Although, to be fair, you could remove the female from that previous sentence and, in a book that gathers together C.E Murphy, Kate Elliot, Robin Hobb and Kelley Armstrong, it would not be any less true… If you are already a fan of any of the authors included in the collection it will be a fun extension to the canon and if you’ve never read them before, then this would be an excellent sampler to see if you’d enjoy their other works. On its own merits A Fantasy Medley is definitely worth a read. The narratives and tightly woven and well told, the authors’ familiarity with their worlds gives the setting a concrete feel and the stories are interesting and original.”
On Metamorphosis (James P. Blaylock): “‘Stone Eggs’ with Adriana Campoy, ‘P-38′ with Brittany Cox and ‘Houses’ with Alex Haniford are all well-crafted, engaging stories and I’d be surprised if at least one of them doesn’t make an appearance in a bookshop near you in the future. The stories are all cleverly conceived, well-written and full of the authors’ enthusiasm. ‘Stone Eggs’ is a charming, slightly claustrophobic story that takes both its main character and its reader beyond the horizon. It’s also my personal favourite, if only for the hand-me-down cat. ‘P-38′ is a wistful story of loss and the erosion caused to both places and memory by the passage of time, an impressively mature tale by Brittany Cox. Last, but not least, is ‘Houses’, a quietly eerie story that explores loss and disillusionment through the neighbourhood myths that grow up around any old, abandoned house. It’s a dark little tale, but certainly not without its charm.”