A wonderful follow up to The Crimson Petal and the White. The book moves around in time quite a bit, there are some stories featuring Sugar before the events of Crimson Petal, but others follow characters after the events of Crimson have finished. Well worth tracking down and reading, although more Sugar would have been nice. ( )

A delightful collection of seven short stories from the world of The Crimson Petal and the White. I had loved that novel so, that when I found out there were more glimpses into the Crimson Petal world, I just had to get it.

The stories here are nothing spectacular and they don't reveal anything major about the characters. With the way the original novel ended, I'm sure people thought these stories would be a nice little wrap-up, as it were. They are not. They are, however, a sort of revisit of old friends and being introduced to a few new ones.

Some of the stories take place before The Crimson Petal and the White and some take place after. Some a short time before, some a long time before; some a short time after, some a long time after.

You get to drop in on the main characters of Sugar and William Rackman and others such as Clara, Mr. Bodley and Emmeline Fox.

Overall, a satisfying collection of stories that would be entertaining to anyone who loved the original novel and know that they're not going to find anything too revealing here. ( )

Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White created a detailed world and then ended abruptly without any closure to many of the story lines. While this book of stories, set in the same universe with many of the same characters, doesn't clear up everything, it goes a long way towards alleviating some of the disappointment. Most of the stories are set either before or after the events of the novel, and the most satisfying is written by Sophie's son as a very old man. ( )

I cannot get enough of Faber's characters. If he wrote 10 more books about Sugar, William, Agnes, and their world I would read them all. My favourite of the book's short stories was the last one, titled "A Mighty Horde of Women in Very Big Hats". The 60-page story manages to do for me what history books have failed to: it makes me visualize the whole stretch of time from the Victorian era to the Edwardian one. Faber makes you grasp the historical realities of the time in one quick gulp, a feat not even Dickens accomplishes. The man is an extremely talented writer and I will definitely look for more of his novels. ( )

(#35 in the 2009 book challenge)
Short stories about the characters from The Crimson Petal and the White, some which take place prior to the events of that book, and some after. We shall take the high quality of Faber's writing as a given, and beyond that, I had a mixed reaction. I was a little more intrigued with the stories of things that happened before, for the most part. Finding out, even remotely, what happened after made things feel too pat. And a lot of the happenings are things you might have guessed anyway, so it wasn't even as if there were any huge surprises. And the very first story in the collection reads like A Very Special Crimson Petal, which struck me as an odd choice. That's probably an unfair criticism, poor Michel Faber likely doesn't know what "A Very Special ..." is in the first place.

Grade: B+
Recommended: I think people who enjoyed The Crimson Petal and the White should consider this very carefully before reading: it is good, but it caps the story. ( )