A review by qa9
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection by Val Nolan, Ian McDonald, Greg Egan, Geoff Ryman, Lavie Tidhar, Nancy Kress, Martin L. Shoemaker, Karl Bunker, Neal Asher, Michael Swanwick, Sandra McDonald, Carrie Vaughn, Robert Reed, Jay Lake, Brendan DuBois, Paul McAuley, Alexander Jablokov, Stephen Baxter, Sean McMullen, Jake Kerr, Aliette de Bodard, Alastair Reynolds, Gardner Dozois, Ken Liu, Sunny Moraine, James Patrick Kelly, Allen M. Steele, Ian R. MacLeod, Damien Broderick, Melissa Scott

4.0

The only thing stopping me from giving this book six stars (besides the fact that there are only five available) was the editing. Carrie Vaughn is an artist and this book was written beautifully. Unfortunately, sometimes characters would be introduced randomly and some facts (like at one point Jill, the main character, gets cut in a sword fight) are ignored and not mentioned again. (We never hear of this wound again.) Overall though this book was very good and I didn't want to put it down. I slightly envied Jill to be honest.