BLUE BOOK BALLOON praises Jo Walton’s STARLINGS.

I’m less sure – whatever you call these pieces, there is some very good reading here. STARLINGS is a nicely varied collection showing a great range from fantasy to SF to fairy tales to things I can’t really classify. They are vastly entertaining, often thought provoking and invariably worth paying attention to. While one or two of the pieces are very short or are definitely, as Walton says, jokes, most are longer and stand up well by themselves.

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Overall this is a nice collection. While some of the pieces probably aren’t short stories as such they illustrate the range of what Walton can do and almost everything here contains an arresting thought, a well turned phrase or a perceptive, different view on something. Recommended, and not just for Walton completists!

THE MISADVENTURES OF A READER likes the collection.

I am going to call this feature The Good, The Bad and The Ugly from now on. There were some amazing reads this month and not so amazing reads. Here is the obligatory disclaimer…this is my experience with each one of these books. Someone else may enjoy them more then I did..this is in no way anything to do with my feelings about the author. With that out of the way lets get started shall we:

The Good: 3-5 stars (Books that I thought were good – books I thought were amaze balls)

– STARLINGS by Jo Walton – 5

The Swedish site BUTTERTARD RDETBUTTERTARORDE offers a quote from STARLINGS. Oddly, it’s transcribed in Swedish even though no Swedish edition of the book exists.

“‘Useless, that’s what you are,’ the girl said. ‘Why I could make a man every bit as good as you out of two rhymes and a handful of moonshine.’

 ‘I’d like to see you try,’ said the man.

So the girl reached up to where the bright silver moon had just risen above the hills and she drew together a handful of moonshine. Then she twisted together two rhymes to run right through it and let it go. There stood a man, in a jacket as violet as the twilight, with buttons as silver as the moon.”

ur “Three twilight tales” i Starlings av Jo Walton

Translation from Swedish courtesy of Google

For more info on STARLINGS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story