So Fey
Collection of fairy-themed fiction. Lesbian, bisexual, and gay protagonists.
. Not Recommended.
January 21, 2010 | Revid 460 < prev | next >
A large collection of fairy-themed stories from new and established authors, including Holly Black, Melissa Scott, Sarah Monette, Richard Bowes, Laurie J. Marks, and Delia Sherman. But I was left more impressed by the quantity than the quality: of twenty-two stories, I only enjoyed three.
The two best were Bowes's elegant "The Wand's Boy," which I'd definitely pick up if it were ever expanded into a novel, and Marks's whimsical take on a familiar myth, "How the Ocean Loved Margie," a story whose charm had me laughing out loud more than once, though its conclusion left me thoughtful. Eugie Foster—an author whose name is new to me—drew on Chinese mythology in her "Year of the Fox," a story I enjoyed all the more for having recently read Larissa Lai's When Fox is a Thousand.
Most of the rest of the stories suffered from the kind of amateurish fumbling I can't tolerate anymore: overwrought prose, stilted dialog, and a failure to grasp the basics of grammar. The experienced authors weren't much better. Sarah Monette's "Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland" was disappointingly slipshod. Delia Sherman's "The Faerie Cony-Catcher" was hindered by a style so archaic I gave up trying to fight through it. And I couldn't bring myself to even attempt Melissa Scott's racially-charged "Mr. Seeley."
On top of the literary flaws—which are, in part, subjective—Lethe Press either did a terrible job editing this book, or they sent me one from a bad batch. Several stories were obviously missing words here and there, others had arbitrary carriage returns, and the opening three paragraphs of Kenneth D. Woods's "The Kings of Oak and Holly" were so horribly mangled I wondered if their software hadn't eaten and regurgitated it. Even the contributor notes weren't immune, saying that writer M. Kate Havas "currently lived in Georgia" and that this was "her fist published story."
In that sense, I have a little sympathy for the authors in this sub-par collection, but I won't go so far as to recommend you read it. Good anthologies are few and far between—and So Fey only makes them feel all the rarer.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. Please attribute this work to "Finder at GLBT Fantasy Fiction Resources." Linkbacks are always appreciated.
