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MASQUERADE SEASON - 'Pemi Aguda A story where the fantastic is a way to explore the kind of familial ties in which you and your uniqueness suddenly become a thing to exploit and drain of life, for your own supposed future benefit. Under its layer of colourful details, it packs a very hurtful emotional punch.

THE LAY OF LILYFINGER  - G.V. Anderson Is it more sci-fi or more fantasy? No idea, it doesn't matter. Displacement from home, xenophobia, people dealing with change and with the need to hold on to language and culture as a way to resist the cruelty of the world. It's a story that immediately kicks you into the deeper end of the pool that is its world, without explanations, and is better for it, I think.

THE RED MOTHER - Elizabeth Bear It's hard not to like Auga Hacksilver, by the end of the story. Auga the wordsmith. Auga the cunning. Auga the weaver. Auga the sorcerer. It's a story set somewhere and sometime in the viking era, that uses kenningar to give even more threedimensionality and depth to its plot, where a man looking for his brother finds instead an old acquaintance, an active volcano, and a dragon. The kind of story that makes you go "YES! MORE, PLEASE!"

THE TINDER BOX - Kate Elliott This is a fairy tale. It starts with the narrator being killed by the man she'll use to start a revolution. It starts with a head rolling under a holly three and continues with the words "Teach a callow man to be a soldier and he will learn to use violence to solve his problems." It has witchery, and bad kings, and a magic tinder box. Most of all, it's a story about injustice and revolution. Days like these, I wish the witch were around and setting a new plan in motion.

QUESTIONS ASKED IN THE BELLY OF THE WORLD - A.T. Greenblatt This is one of the stories from this anthology that I think will remain with me forever. There's something in its fungal world, in its two lovers who can't content themselves with the status quo and keep on asking questions, keep on defying the rules of their small, mushroom-built World… It's creepy and scary and at times horrifying, and yet so full of hope and defiance! I would have loved a few hundred pages more of Kenji and Eva's life and World, but at the same time this is the perfect size and shape.

BLACK LEG - Glen Hirshberg A weird story in which nothing happens and yet stuff happens, maybe, sorta. A ghost hunting documentary filmmaker goes to see a guy at work to see if second guy's workplace is, indeed, haunted. Personally, I don't think it works super well in written form, but as a horror short, it would have probably been great. At least it's not boring.

THE WONDERFUL STAG, OR THE COURTSHIP OF RED ELSIE - Kathleen Jennings Another fairy tale, this one bathed in even more blood than The Tinder Box. Quick and angry like mob justice, perfectly creepy in its shortness. Five blood-red stars!

BLOOD IN THE THREAD - Cheri Kamei This one hurts. It's about Sapphic love and abuse, fame and its constrictions, love that maybe is true and maybe it isn't, you'll only know far too late. The legend of the crane wife (and a reflection on it) is weaved into it all and makes the story of the two nameless protagonists even more painful. Delicious!

SAND - Jasmin Kirkbride This is a weird one, a reeeeal weird one. I have a feeling it's a metaphor about trauma, the myriad of things our parents inject into our lives since we're little, and the process of slowly unburdening ourselves until we don't inflict the same amounts of harm on our kids. Or maybe it's just about a world in which, as soon as you're born, your parents put sand in your mouth and you'll have to live with a sandy mouth all your life? Who knows!

NOW WE PAINT WORLDS - Matthew Kressel Whole planets have gone missing and an office worker is sent to talk to a man who might know what happened. It's an interesting story about nihilism and hope which mostly fails to actually address the idea that, since there seems to be nothing around, then humanity is perfectly free to colonize everything in space. Could have been more nuanced, but it's still an enjoyable story about not giving up to nihilism.

#SPRING LOVE, #PICHAL PAIRI - Usman T. Malik A journalist goes to interview a mythological woman with backwards feet. He's the obnoxious narrator. She's giving him more attention than he deserves. And then he wonders about [insert mild foot kink here] and I closed the ebook for the night, and when I returned to it, I skipped to the next story because, yeah, this squicked me so much that it's apparent that foot kink really is not a kink of mine, not even in the mildest form. #SorryNext

LET ALL THE CHILDREN BOOGIE - Sam J. Miller If living in a small town, the constrictions of gender norms and other people's expectations, falling in love with each other, and falling in love with new music, weren't enough for teenagers Fell and Laurie, then there's the weird interference that's popping up during their favourite night radio show. Is it the Russians? An alien? A lost pilot? A time traveller? Something else? There's something incredibly soft and angsty and, once again, hopeful, in this story, and I absolutely love these two kids!

#SELFCARE - Annalee Newitz It's the slightly dystopian future. It's LA. It's influencers and marketing and minimum wage workers. It's the beauty industry. It's impossible things happening at the Skin Seraph beauty store and salon where Edwina works. It's shitty bosses making people angry, and crappy customers, and new friendships, and maybe the fae exist?!? It's a delightful cauldron of things that you'd think shouldn't go together and instead work perfectly! I was grinning maniacally at the end!

THE FAR SIDE OF THE UNIVERSE - noc A pretty predictable plot, but at least it's on a very short story, so there's that. Still not sure how I feel about it overall. Probably at the conjunction of "meh" and "eh!" Still not sure how to pronounce ♦&x, which is one of the characters names. I think I went with "that one" all the time. Not one for the annals, sadly.

A BETTER WAY OF SAYING - Sarah Pinsker This is a wild one! It's 1915. There's a young man who works voicing the lines from silent movies for the members of the public who can't read. He discovers he has the power to forever change lines in the movies if he says them aloud with enough conviction. It goes from there. It's a weird concept with a nice execution. "I briefly knew magic, real magic if small".

BABY TEETH - Daniel Polansky The story about a vampire killing teenaged girls and the man hunting him are the backdrop for a small town boy to discover that he's not a hero, never has been and never will, even if he plays a paladin during D&D with his friends. (Friends who suck, by the way, jesus fuck, someone kick these horrible boys' balls into dust please!) It's a sad story about the sadder realization of your impotence and the difference between life and fiction. I loved that the setting is painfully normal and provincial, even with a hungry vampire to up the stakes (pun not intended).

THE FUTURE LIBRARY - Peng Shepherd Do you want pain? Because we have it spades, here! We have grief, and the horror of our dying world on the brink of ecological collapse, and the fear of discovering you're impotent against the government body that ought to help you, and the injustice of imprisonment, and the anger at a lie being peddled left right and centre. But there's also love, and defiance, and an arborist loving the last forest on earth with all her broken heart. It's a bleak read, but also a good one. I need to find Ingrid and hug her, tight.

APTITUDE - Cooper Shrivastava "One may ascend to godhood in the same way one attains any other competitive position: a series of rigorous standardized exams." And Alena, recycling processor, has registered to one such exam. Her universe is dying and she's on a self-imposed mission: meeting someone from the Board of Cosmogamy and ask why the fuck they did what they did to her universe! She's underprepared, angry at being the diversity candidate, and ready to do everything. Even cheating. Lots of stuff that reads like technobabble, in here, and yet it works. Go, Alena, go!

JUDGE DEE AND THE THREE DEATHS OF COUNT WERDENFELS - Lavie Tidhar A vampire judge is summoned to supervise on the matter of a vampire having just been murdered and who's gonna get his inheritance. He and his dejected thrall will investigate and find that things are waaaaay more convoluted than everyone wants them to be. A fun little story, with the most resigned human ever trudging along for the ride and only caring about where his next meal and lit fireplace will be, really.

L’ESPRIT DE L’ESCALIER - Catherynne M. Valente What if Orpheus never turned back and so managed to bring Eurydice back to the living world? What if she came back wrong? What if you mixed modern world and mythology for it all, with pop star Orpheus and Calliope, his mother, a famous writer, and Apollo as a legend of rock? What about Persephone in a power armor? What if mold and asphodels and cypresses and ash grew and grew and grew around the returned Eurydice? What if the love that moved Hades to return her to life started rotting around her? What if Orpheus was a dick, all things considered? What if what if what if? This is another story that won't leave my mind any time soon. I had already read it on the tor.com website and it was a pleasure to reread it, in all its mouldy, poetic, sad, putrefying glory. Another unforgettable one.

AN EASY JOB - Carrie Vaugh A fast action story set in a sci-fi world, with spaceships, and space stations, and space pirates, and a secret race of cyborgs whose life goal is to travel and exchange the whole of their experiences with their people. And also a story about friendship, lies, jaded people and young idealists clashing; about helping the world be a less shitty place, and the fact sometimes it's hard to reconcile different points of view. I want more of this worldddddd! T^T

SMALL MONSTERS - E. Lily Yu This is the perfect story to close the anthology. On the surface, it's a wild story about a literal monster who can regrow cut off limbs (!), which is so convenient (?) because other monsters love to feed off of its limbs (!!), first and foremost its parent (!!!); and when the small monster manages to escape its horrible situation, it befriends an artistic hermit crab (!!) who hosts anemones that are its art critics (??) and who decorates the small monster's body with see glass and rocks, Spanish gold and whale bones; and they are friends, and the small monster and the hermit crab build an island (!!!!), after they've survived bad things that happen in a set of three, because this is another fairy tale, after all. But if you look just under the surface, it's also a painful, sad story about horrible families that eat you alive, and abusive relationships, and people taking advantage of your kindness, and art (and art criticism), and friends, and changing each other through love, and building stuff with your friends, and hope. So much hope in this monstrous little thing! (Did I cry reading this last story? Hell yeah! I'm still misty eyed as I write this, and it's been 12 hours!)