A review by just_hebah
Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful by Mercedes Lackey, Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman
3.0
I always go into short story collections with the expectation that the stories are going to be a mixture of hit or miss. A good collection brings me new gems from favorite authors and introduces me to authors I should be reading. This collection was... OK. Just OK.
Many of the stories neither stunned me nor disappointed me. But tellingly, I can only really recall a few of them off the top of my head. The selections seemed to be chosen to provide as an encyclopedic overview of the range of fictional depiction of witches rather than to provide highlights, and frankly, there were more old reprints than I like in a relatively contemporary collection, seemingly more for name recognition than for being necessarily the best examples (like the highlighted Neil Gaiman, whose selection is an excerpt from The Graveyard Boy or the Mercedes Lackey story, originally published in 1989 and featuring tropes that have since become rather familiar in urban fantasy).
Highlights did include Delia Sherman's "Walpurgis Afternoon," a charming story of a couple of lesbian witches who move into unsuspecting suburbia and help the local women discover their own inner magic; "The Cold Blacksmith" by the talented Elizabeth Bear, featuring a very matter-of-fact witch who helps a blacksmith with an impossible task; Bloodlines, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, about a teenage witch coming into her familial powers with terrifying application; and Richard Parks' "Skin Deep," a story of a young witch finding her own way separate from that of her grandmother's way of doing things.
Many of the stories neither stunned me nor disappointed me. But tellingly, I can only really recall a few of them off the top of my head. The selections seemed to be chosen to provide as an encyclopedic overview of the range of fictional depiction of witches rather than to provide highlights, and frankly, there were more old reprints than I like in a relatively contemporary collection, seemingly more for name recognition than for being necessarily the best examples (like the highlighted Neil Gaiman, whose selection is an excerpt from The Graveyard Boy or the Mercedes Lackey story, originally published in 1989 and featuring tropes that have since become rather familiar in urban fantasy).
Highlights did include Delia Sherman's "Walpurgis Afternoon," a charming story of a couple of lesbian witches who move into unsuspecting suburbia and help the local women discover their own inner magic; "The Cold Blacksmith" by the talented Elizabeth Bear, featuring a very matter-of-fact witch who helps a blacksmith with an impossible task; Bloodlines, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, about a teenage witch coming into her familial powers with terrifying application; and Richard Parks' "Skin Deep," a story of a young witch finding her own way separate from that of her grandmother's way of doing things.