Lexie Brookner has begun to shift between different versions of her reality — one where the brother she lost in his 30s to a drug overdose as well as her late husband are alive, but her living and happily-retired sister was brutally murdered as a young adult, and occasionally one where the world seems to be, frankly, falling apart. She wonders if she might be hallucinating or maybe even have dementia, and her children — as well as her alternate husband and brother — are beginning to worry about her.

This was the kind of story I really enjoy about what one little thing many years ago might have done to catapult you into being a totally different 'you' with a different life. There were themes of love, loss, family — and of course, a very supportive Great Dane. I liked this story, and I don't think it gets 'too sci-fi' for your average reader.

As a separate note from the story, I was disappointed by the file I received. It wasn't formatted well, and showed up on my e-reader as 'Unknown' by 'Unknown', with no cover image. The chapter titles in the navigation pane were also all in caps, which may or may not have been intentional but was straining to the eye.

I found this to be a wonderful little collection on the experiences of womanhood, with some very creative and moving stories, although there were one or two I felt I didn't 'get'. This collection covered a pretty wide range of genres and topics, including what one might describe as dystopian (or utopian?), historical, contemporary, fantasy, and thriller. Two of my favourites, 'Feerday's Fog' and 'The Ferig Express', were beautiful surrealist metaphors about some of the most trying times in our lives, and another favourite, the titular 'Shut Me Up in Prose', sees a free-spirited and eccentric woman in the 1960s condemned to a woman's insane asylum by her husband as he feels he has insufficient control over her.

I did very much enjoy this collection and would recommend it to others who enjoy short stories.

I was very excited to win this ER. What a fun concept! Two best friends get hired at the publishing company responsible for their favourite web-novel in high school, and get transported into the world themselves, where they have to save the world they loved and resolve the story which left off on a hiatus years ago. I wasn't a huge fan of the narrative voice, and often found myself rolling my eyes, especially in the beginning. It's hard for me to articulate exactly what the problem was — trying too hard to be self aware, perhaps? If this wasn't an ER read, I would have put it down — I'm glad I didn't. I also found Rachael as a character to be frustratingly dense. Nonetheless, I did truly enjoy the world the author has shoved Rachel & Nora into and the characters they meet, and I may have to pick up the next book when it becomes available.

I was really sucked into the world of this story, where 2 groups of 8 Divinities pass down various intriguing abilities to the majority of the population. Of the two main characters, Meiling Katz, the underdog with no abilities but lots of enthusiasm and intelligence, and Suraya Zialitos, the golden child from the most powerful family with the most powerful abilities ever recorded, I must say that I found Meiling more interesting and dynamic, but I did still enjoy reading Suraya's chapters.

The action kept me engaged throughout the book, although I felt the sense of time in the book was not established very strongly; sometimes one chapter would abruptly begin weeks after the last, simply because nothing interesting apparently had happened in the meantime. I caught on to the major twist in the story early, which I can forgive since this is a YA novel.

I will certainly be looking forward to the next in the series.

I really enjoyed the world created in this book. I was very fond of Eva, and I enjoyed the arcs of character growth over the course of the book. However, I often found the prose a bit forced or unnatural; the narration had a tendency to discuss the psychoanalytical reasoning behind the actions of the characters. It went contrary to the oft-quoted 'show-don't-tell' advice, and became a little grating. There were also times I felt the pacing to be a bit off, like characters falling in love or getting over a death too quickly. Nonetheless, I still found this book pretty fun and charming.

Through no fault, I'm sure, of the author's own, my digital copy of this book had some sort of encoding error, and every hyphen had a question mark before and after it (think 'jack?-?of?-?all?-?trades') and every m-dash had a question mark before it ('like this?—see') which was jarring at first, but which I feel I eventually got used to.