A review by misssusan
After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia by Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling
3.0
I've been sitting on this review for a couple of days because I couldn't bring myself to muster up the degree of effort it would take to say something about nineteen separate stories. :/ Frankly I've read fewer short story collections this year than I typically do because of that. I have thus decided there's absolutely no reason why I should have to review it that way! So the collection as a whole: quite strong! I like the diversity of the protagonists in terms of sexual orientation, I was less impressed on its approach to race. :/ Also on how every single story in this collection is set in the US or its' counterpart, like I know that's pretty standard for these types of YA collections but I've been reading a lot of really excellent properly diverse YA short stories online so that isn't quite cutting it for me anymore.
But back to the positive! I did actually quite like this collection after all. :) I liked how media manipulation ended up as an (un/intentional?) theme in this collection, I feel like fostering a healthy distrust of media narratives in teenagers is a noble goal indeed. :) Plus a very plausible element of any dystopia so. My favourite stories of the collection were After the Cure by Genevieve Valentine (television lies in various and terrible ways, felt like the kind of thing Suzanne Collins was aiming to show in Mockingjay), Faint Heart by Sarah Rees Brennan (perfect post-apocalyptic fairytale!), Reunion by Susan Beth Pfeffer (exactly as harsh and cruel as you'd expect characters who'd survived a brutal regime to be and the ending packed a nice punch) and Valedictorian by N. K. Jemisin (I adored the protagonist and found the world interesting; I was very pleased to learn she's considering returning to it in a YA novel). There were a couple of stories here based on authors' pre-existing novels, I found they tended to be a little weaker than the rest. For example, Garth Nix's 'You Won't Feel A Thing' had interesting worldbuilding but I'm 90% certain I would've gotten more out of it if I'd read Shade's Children. It felt like the kind of world that needed a book even before I saw the note on the end explaining the connection. 3.5 stars
But back to the positive! I did actually quite like this collection after all. :) I liked how media manipulation ended up as an (un/intentional?) theme in this collection, I feel like fostering a healthy distrust of media narratives in teenagers is a noble goal indeed. :) Plus a very plausible element of any dystopia so. My favourite stories of the collection were After the Cure by Genevieve Valentine (television lies in various and terrible ways, felt like the kind of thing Suzanne Collins was aiming to show in Mockingjay), Faint Heart by Sarah Rees Brennan (perfect post-apocalyptic fairytale!), Reunion by Susan Beth Pfeffer (exactly as harsh and cruel as you'd expect characters who'd survived a brutal regime to be and the ending packed a nice punch) and Valedictorian by N. K. Jemisin (I adored the protagonist and found the world interesting; I was very pleased to learn she's considering returning to it in a YA novel). There were a couple of stories here based on authors' pre-existing novels, I found they tended to be a little weaker than the rest. For example, Garth Nix's 'You Won't Feel A Thing' had interesting worldbuilding but I'm 90% certain I would've gotten more out of it if I'd read Shade's Children. It felt like the kind of world that needed a book even before I saw the note on the end explaining the connection. 3.5 stars