Sister Emily's Lightship and Other Stories is a collection of Jane Yolen's short stories. The title story is a "what if" look at Emily Dickinson, a poet from Amherst, Massachusetts. Emily's eye and health issues force her to become a recluse within her family home, venturing out only at night. The story brings excitement and travel to her life through a visit from a being on a lightship. Emily gains personal peace and perspective from her view of the earth from space. This twist of reality explains the life of an otherwise private woman of the Nineteenth Century.

Yolen's short stories in this collection often describe situations in which the characters face moral and social dilemmas. Sometimes the stories resemble fairy tales that often end in reality not “happily ever after”. Readers will gain perspective and understanding from the stories. I read the stories as comments on our society and its past that brought us to our present. Her bold stories express life beyond the magic of fairy tales; humanity relying on life skills, emotions and self-knowledge to persevere. Many times the endings involve ironic twists of fate with the protagonist displaying stoic determination.

I recommend Sister Emily's Lightship and Other Stories to you to challenge and spark your thinking. As Yolen explores her topics, the author often emerges as narrator/commentator to express a voice that often connects the stories. Jane Yolen is a gifted story teller and the images drawn in this collection are entertaining and intriguing.

( )

Short stories, pointless adaptations of traditional motifs. Usually I like this writer.
[read 2001-18 yr ago--did not recommend it then] ( )

I know Yolen mostly from her beautiful books for much younger readers, but was interested when this happened to cross my desk. Some of the stories are very dark, some are perhaps a tiny bit predictable, but overall this is quite good. And I much enjoyed her notes on how the stories came to be. ( )

(Alistair) A new author, this time, and a book which has been sitting on my to-read shelf for something over a year now, I think, possibly because I have been mostly in the mood for novels, rather than a collection of short stories.

A thing to be regretted, I think, since this proved to be a very enjoyable book, packed with delightful stories - most but not all in the fairy tale style, and both darkness and humor mixed, coupled with fascinating twists on the reader's normal expectations. Of which, to be enumerative for once, I shall mention my particular favorites:

* The Thirteenth Fey, The Uncorking of Uncle Finn, and Dusty Loves just because this whole family of fey are made of awesome.
* Granny Rumple, a retold Rumplestiltskin as a story of anti-Semitism.
* The Sleep of Trees, in which a dryad meets a god... of sorts.
* Salvage, an SFnal tale in which aliens salvage haiku from a dying poet.
* Under the Hill, in which fey meets gangster for mutual benefit.
* Creationism: An Illustrated Lecture in Two Parts, which is made of even more deliciously satirical awesome.
* Memoirs of a Bottle Djinn, in which a Greek slave in Araby discovers a bottled djinniyeh... and more.

Which is, of course, by no means to sell the other stories in the volume (including the Nebula-winning title story) short, but then, one can't praise everything. In short and to sum up, then, an excellent book that I would heartily recommend to anyone who likes the genre.
( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/cerebrate/2008/04/sister-emilys-lightship-jan... ) ( )

http://www.lincolnlibraries.org/depts/bookguide/srec/staffrec06-06.htm ( )