Friday, December 12, 2014

Wishes and Sorrows by Cindy Lynn Speer

Note: I received a NetGalley free copy of “Wishes and Sorrows” by Cindy Lynn Speer in exchange for an honest review.

I still love fairy tale retellings but honestly I need to stop getting collections of short story fairy tales like this for one simple reason: when the stories are so short there’s really nothing all that new that can be said. It’s different when it’s a full book about one specific story because it means there’s a chance for the author to create a new background story, new information about the characters. That’s not really the case with 10-20 page stories.

There were a few segments that were more of an original idea/story than the others and while some of them were very interesting to read others were odd. I can’t remember the names of which ones stuck out but there were a few that just didn’t make sense at all, they were disjointed and kind of pointless. I understand the struggle of finding a balance between keeping a short story short and making an actual point because I’ve written some short stories myself but if you’re going to publish something in a collection I feel as though you should have to make it feel as though there was a reason for the story in the first place and some of these didn’t have that.

So out of the dozen or so stories there were maybe four really original ones, most of which didn’t make sense. The rest were more traditional and familiar, as though I’d read them before. And one story, the only one I really remember and enjoyed, was something I had read in a previous fairy tale collection. It’s called “Necklace of Rubies” and was a retelling of the story of Blackbeard. I especially loved this one because it was dark and creepy and it was based on a tale that wasn’t as common as some of the others.

From now on out I probably will not be requesting/reading fairy tale collections anymore just because, as I said earlier, the stories are too short to really offer anything new.

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