Kathleen Jennings

This collection of short stories read as fairy tales, often as a play on well known works and with a truth at its heart. Jennings uses different writing styles, allowing each story to be a surprise, both in content and in structure. The stories are full of remarkable characters and places, but speak to the universal truths: love, freedom, companionship, identity. And lots of birds! I didn’t love every story, but I did love most. Unfortunately, the most difficult story is the first; you may want to visit that one last.… (meer)

Kathleen Jennings's strengths as an author lie primarily in coming up with sharp, unsettling fantasy concepts and drawing them out in vivid detail. The short story is perhaps the ideal length for this - Jennings's novella Flyaway was atmospheric and had striking moments, but the meandering plot left something to be desired.

The stories in this collection often revolve around women who are determined to get what they want at all costs. Many of them draw on fairy tales and folklore, but Jennings manages to find unusual twists that keep the stories fresh. "A Hedge of Yellow Roses" is a take on Sleeping Beauty that features an eternally-young noblewoman gone half-feral in her hundred or more years without human contact, and "Undine Love" mines the Princess and the Frog for a surprising amount of horror and tragedy (though it is also frequently funny). Despite their well-worn origins, none of these stories feel tired or predictable, which is impressive. Other standouts include "Skull and Hyssop", an adventure/mystery with some memorable bits of sailing-related fantasy worldbuilding, and "Not to Be Taken", a portrait of a morally ambiguous woman who gets in over her head with a dangerous man and must come up with a scheme to escape his clutches.

As is usually true of short story collections, not all of the stories are winners, and it's unfortunate that in this case that includes both the opening story (the dense and perhaps overly ornate "Heart of Owl Abbas") and the title story (the eminently forgettable "Kindling"). But on balance, there's more good than bad here, and I would recommend the collection to fans of dark fantasy that leans towards the literary.… (meer)

If this had been billed as poetry, my rating would have been higher. I would call this a poem or prose-poem rather than a story. There is no narrative, nor are there any characters. Considered as a poem, it’s not bad, though it’s not my preferred type of poetry. It’s an interesting look at fairy-tales, fairy-tale retellings, and stories generally. But it is not, itself, a story, and it does bill itself as one - hence my rating: Not unpleasant to read, but not a good or even average story. The cover is lovely.… (meer)