Fantasy Gone Wrong

There were a lot of interesting worlds and premises here, but in the end, only two or three out of seventeen grabbed me. Most of the rest took an idea and wrapped a limp story around it.

Nifty idea, hilarious cover, so-so story selection. The first and last few are just fine. The majority in the middle are non-fantasy stories written with fantasy characters or merely well-known fantastic characters' names: parodies, I suppose, of both fantasy and another genre (e.g., hard-boiled detective fiction in the case of "The Murder of Mr. Wolf"). Those ones are silly but not charming.

I like to get short story anthologies, because they're interruptable (I have issues with putting a book down mid-plot to go do something else; I'm not good at it), they often introduce new writers or allow a favorite and much-read author to explore genres other than what I normally see them in, and they're just all around cool.

This one was something of a disappointment. The stories weren't all that interesting, and I often found myself bored or irritated only a few paragraphs in. It wasn't captivating, descriptive writing. It just didn't deliver.

Hit and miss, as happens in most anthologies. There were some stories I liked quite a lot, and others that I skimmed (or skipped). Most of the stories were short enough to get through in about five minutes--perfect!

Maybe I just approached this collection with the wrong attitude, but for some reason I expected humor. Unfortunately, it wasn't funny, it wasn't terribly entertaining, and it wasn't a very memorable collection, either.

I would recommend Josepha Sherman's "The Murder of Mr. Wolf" for fans of Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime books, and Susan Sizemore's "New Yorke Snowe" is interesting. Just don't expect funny.

These stories make you smile by taking traditional fantasy formulas and giving them a good twist.

The tile is accurate.