weweresotired's review
3.0
Red Phone Box is an ambitious set of interconnected stories all centered around a red phone box in London. Nearly all of the stories are intertwined in some way, with the same characters weaving throughout the many different chapters. With twenty-eight different authors, it's hard to imagine how they made it all sound like one cohesive book, but they really did an excellent job in putting it together and making everything flow well.
This is a hard one to categorize -- there are vampires and aliens and urban fantasy aspects and maybe something like time travel and also some mythology and horror and and and... Every story brings a little something different to the table. Trying to unravel all of the different threads in this one was a really great hook to keep the reader interested and engaged the whole way through. This book really was unlike anything else I've read, but I could easily imagine it as a TV show or something. I love interconnected stories where even seemingly minor players wind up being important and popping up throughout a story, and the visuals of that -- the "oh, I've seen that lady before!" reaction -- would be cool in a visual media format.
It can be a little bit of a tough read in the respect that it bounces around a lot, so you may spend several chapters not reading about a character only to come back to them later and have to remind yourself who they were and why they're important. There is a list of characters at the end, with a quick one-sentence style summary of who they are as well as a listing of their first appearances. But given the way that many characters pop up -- often unnamed at first, or just in the background, and then they turn out to be important later -- I think it might be best to refer to it just if you've totally blanked out on who a character is.
Due to some subject matter and violence, I'd recommend this for mature readers. It can be a challenging read at time, but definitely worth it, in my opinion.
This is a hard one to categorize -- there are vampires and aliens and urban fantasy aspects and maybe something like time travel and also some mythology and horror and and and... Every story brings a little something different to the table. Trying to unravel all of the different threads in this one was a really great hook to keep the reader interested and engaged the whole way through. This book really was unlike anything else I've read, but I could easily imagine it as a TV show or something. I love interconnected stories where even seemingly minor players wind up being important and popping up throughout a story, and the visuals of that -- the "oh, I've seen that lady before!" reaction -- would be cool in a visual media format.
It can be a little bit of a tough read in the respect that it bounces around a lot, so you may spend several chapters not reading about a character only to come back to them later and have to remind yourself who they were and why they're important. There is a list of characters at the end, with a quick one-sentence style summary of who they are as well as a listing of their first appearances. But given the way that many characters pop up -- often unnamed at first, or just in the background, and then they turn out to be important later -- I think it might be best to refer to it just if you've totally blanked out on who a character is.
Due to some subject matter and violence, I'd recommend this for mature readers. It can be a challenging read at time, but definitely worth it, in my opinion.
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