The Queen's Army by Marissa Meyer

Title: The Queen's Army (Lunar Chronicles #1.5)
Author: Marissa Meyer
Publication Date: November 23, 2012
Length: about 18 pages (ebook)

The Queen's Army is a short story in the Lunar Chronicles series, giving some backstory for one of the major characters in the second novel, Scarlet. I read this story in between Cinder and Scarlet, which I think is the intended reading order.

Ze'ev recently turned 12 years old, and he's top of his class, and strong, so he knew to expect a visit from the queen's thaumaturges. Not given a choice, he is taken away from his family to be genetically modified and trained as part of the queen's army. His modifications give him the improved strength, agility, and reflexes of a wolf. Since he knows that those who don't perform well are modified further, so that they are barely human, he does all he can to succeed in his new pack.

This is a great story. I loved watching how Z changes in order to survive. It's sad that he couldn't just be a kid and had to be put into such a terrible situation, but I like how he gets stronger and learns what he has to do to survive. Whether you read this one before or after Scarlet, you'll appreciate the backstory!

5 stars.

S is for Space by Ray Bradbury

Title: S is for Space
Author: Ray Bradbury
Publication Date: 1966
Length: 211 pages

S is for Space is a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. There's a big variety, from a guy who turns into a crysalis and hatches, to a dead man climbing out of his grave in a future world where morbid things have been banned, to a kid who hears a woman screaming from underground, but no adults will believe her.

It takes a LOT for short stories to impress me. I've read short story collections by people I adore, like Neil Gaiman, and still thought they were kind of meh. It's just not the format I prefer. Short stories often feel rushed, obviously, but worse than that, I hate when they don't end. I argued endlessly with my high school English teachers about "open endings" and how stupid they are.

Well, these stories, as a general rule, did not have open endings. They were exactly what short stories should be. I enjoyed almost every one of them. So if you're like me, and you're looking for some good short stories with really interesting premises, and that don't leave you hanging, I recommend this book.

4 stars.

This book counted for the 2012 Mount TBR Reading Challenge.

Anthology I: The Other Side by Hamidah Gul

Title: Anthology I: The Other Side
Author: Hamidah Gul
Publication Date: April 20, 2012
Length: 122 pages

Note: I didn't finish this book, so this review covers only the first few stories.

Anthology I is a collection of short stories that are meant to be horror, but on the light and funny side.

The first story (in my copy; it seems to vary, judging by other reviews) was Come Home With Me. This story was really short, just a few pages. There seemed to be a ghost involved, who killed people. That's about all I could gather, because it was one of those short stories that has no explanation, just things happening, and then it's over, leaving me saying "uh, what?".

The next story was The Other Side. It's about a guy who has a near-death experience in which he travels to other planets and discovers that the Earth is going to be destroyed. Right at the beginning I got annoyed when he said two things: 1) He kept referring to Pluto as a planet. I mean, it's been years. I'm sorry, but Pluto is not a planet! 2) He says that we've visited all the planets but Pluto, which I'm fairly certain is not true, even if you count unmanned probes. After that, the story was fairly interesting, but seemed a bit stretched out.

What made me put this one down was not so much that the stories weren't interesting (at least the ideas seemed to have potential). The writing was just too hard to read. Hamidah Gul is writing in a language that is not her first, and that's made pretty clear. The phrasing is often awkward. Also, often people are speaking, but there are no quotation marks. I don't know if that's a mistake, or if she's doing it stylistically (which some authors definitely do), but either way, I hate it. I like to know when people are talking! If this book had gone through an editing process, that would have made a huge difference.

Full disclosure: Free ebook copy received from the author.

Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories

Title: Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories
Author: JoSelle Vanderhooft (editor)
Publication Date: October 2011
Length: 440 pages

First off, let me just say that it is so amazing to read 400 pages of steampunk with no male main characters. That alone makes this book worth reading for anyone who's feeling a little under-represented in the genre. Similarly, the stories take place all over the world, not just in Victorian England, so there's a lot more cultural diversity than is typical. Yay!

As for the individual stories, as usual with short story collections I liked some more than others. However, I definitely liked more than I usually do in this one. For example, in the first story, Journey's End by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall, a material from asteroids is used to build engines, which causes ships to become sentient. After some decades of serving her crew, a sentient ship chooses a crewmember to fly her to her death. In Playing Chess in New Persepolis by Sean Holland, people from around the world participate in a chess tournament with giant steam-powered chess pieces of their own design, where both their technical abilities and their chess skills are put to the test. In The Terracotta Bride by Zen Cho, the reader is shown a fascinating concept of the afterlife, in which people go to Hell, and then try to stay there rather than be reincarnated, and for belongings people have whatever their descendants burn for them.

So overall, while there were a few stories that didn't really do anything for me, I think there were more stories that had truly original ideas, really captured the essence of steampunk, and were really well-written stories that kept me interested and entertained.

4 stars.

This book counts for the 2012 A-Z Book Challenge.

Full disclosure: Free copy received through a Goodreads giveaway.

14 Favorite Christmas Stories

Title: 14 Favorite Christmas Stories
Author: various
Publication Date: 1964
Length: 156 pages

I don't know why I expected a collection of Christmas stories from the 30s to the 60s to be good. It wasn't.

There were a couple stories that had sort of nice endings. For example, the first story starts out all depressing because it's about an old woman who's losing her memory and is gradually realising that she sent the frilly dress for her daughter to her friend who lives in the woods, and the warm socks for her friend to her daughter. But then it ends up all "aww!" because she gets letters from both of them about how much they love their presents, even though they were the wrong ones.

Unfortunately, most of the stories didn't have particularly great endings, or beginnings, or middles. They were just boring. I was hopeful as I got to the end because the last story was by Ray Bradbury, but even it was kind of confusing and dissatisfying.

That's really all there is to say about this one. 1 star.

This book would count towards the Read Your OWN Library! Challenge (hosted by The Beauty of Eclecticism) for December, but I've already got one for this month! Bonus!

The Return of the Light by Carolyn McVickar Edwards

Title: The Return of the Light: Twelve Tales from Around the World for the Winter Solstice
Author: Carolyn McVickar Edwards
Publication Date: 2000
Length: 172 pages (paperback)

The Return of the Light is a collection of stories, most of them involving someone stealing the Sun, and then other characters getting it back. The idea behind these stories is that at the Winter Solstice, the Sun has moved away as far as it's going to, and appears to stay far away, sitting still, causing people to worry that it might not come back.

I normally don't like book introductions very much, for whatever reason. But the introduction to this book really made the book, in my opinion. It describes how ancient people saw the Winter Solstice. Reading it, I could easily imagine living in a time when such an event could be a cause for worry. The Sun has been moving away, and now is sitting still, and the people have to convince it to come back. That's where traditions like the Yule log come from: the log burns, showing the Sun how it's done and convincing it to come back and be bright and hot again. This was a really interesting topic to read about.

As for the stories themselves, I enjoyed them, but I tend to find stories like that kind of repetitive. Which sort of makes sense, since it's basically the same event being explained by different groups of people from around the world. So the interesting thing about them is how similar they are. So I guess I just shouldn't have read them all in a row (the same problem I had when I read The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales).

So overall, I still recommend this book. The introduction is great, and the stories are nice to dip into when you just want to read one short story. They'd be good for reading to kids around the Solstice time, teaching them about the origins of the holiday.