A review by apollos_books
The Starlit Wood by Garth Nix, Karin Tidbeck, Aliette de Bodard, Seanan McGuire, Navah Wolfe, Sofia Samatar, Jeffrey Ford, Kat Howard, Dominik Parisien, Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar, Genevieve Valentine, Charlie Jane Anders, Marjorie Liu, Margo Lanagan, Naomi Novik, Catherynne M. Valente, Theodora Goss, Daryl Gregory, Stephen Graham Jones

adventurous dark emotional funny lighthearted mysterious fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

like with most collections such as these, it's a very mixed bag. some stories are amazing. some are so awful that i skipped them entirely. and the rest are just o.k./forgettable. on the whole though, the collection is lackluster imo.

my standouts:
- "in the desert like a bone" 
- "badgirl"
- "peny for a match"
- "briar and the rose"
- "seasons of glass and iron"
- "pearl"

skips/terrible:
- "even the crumbs were delicious" (extremely racist)
- "the other thea" (anticlimatic, white feminism)
- "reflected" (didn't understand this one at all)
- "tale of mahilya" (this story is told in the form of research notes, so you don't even get a full story. the effect is if your friend read the story and then was briefly summarizing it to you)
- "giants in the sky" (also didn't understand this one. i think it's supposed to be sci-fi but it's way too obscure to be coherent)