Urgh, I hate having to review books like this. This is another case of me really not enjoying the contents of the book, but very much appreciating its literary merits. It’s difficult to give a star rating in such a case. There’s no doubting Swirsky’s talent, but she seems to have taken to using writing as a substitute for therapy. There’s a lot of grimdark and depressing stories in this collection, far too many for my tastes. The collection starts as it means to go on, with the first story, the novella The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window starting with a powerful sorceress being murdered and then recalled on a recurring basis and seeing the land change over the millennia. The protagonist of that story is a very hard woman, who despises men and from a culture that uses lower caste women as walking uteruses. The second story, A Memory of Wind retells the start of the Iliad from the point of view of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon, who must be sacrificed to appease the wrath of Artemis.
The collection begins with a warning that there’s explicit sexual violence in two of the stories. And while The Monster’s Million Faces softens that a bit, With Singleness of Heart is just about unbearable as it gives a close-up of rape as a weapon of war.
There are some points of light in amongst the misery. The Adventures of Captain Blackheart Wentworth is a whimsical fairy tale, and The Taste of Promises is a great little SF adventure story set on Mars, where two boys have run away from home.
There’s a lot of talent in this collection, which I mostly picked up because I knew Swirsky from her time editing the audio fantasy fiction magazine Podcastle, and from her Hugo-winning story If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love. But after reading it, I’ll not be going out of my way to find more of her fiction. As I say, a talented writer, but really not to my taste.
