A Breviary of Fire
by Marie Brennan
Genres: Fantasy, Short StoriesPages: 168
Rating:
Synopsis:“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
The words of composer Gustav Mahler animate this collection of sixteen tales from award-winning author Marie Brennan, inspired by mythological and folkloric traditions around the world. Here you will find flames of revenge, immortality, and grace, as a valkyrie seeks peace, a queen weaves and unweaves her own fate, and a goddess vanishes from mortal memory — but never from the page.
Marie Brennan’s A Breviary of Fire is a collection of short stories — some shorter than others — that fit broadly into the traditions of several different world-regions, each being based on mythology, or at least mythology-adjacent. It’s a pretty quick read, especially as some of the stories are more like prose poems or at least microfiction (which, to be clear, is something I’m enthusiastic about).
For me the most memorable ones were probably the Norse and Greek stories, just because they’re the mythologies I’m most familiar with (having studied them from the English Lit/learning to translate Old Norse angle); I really liked her take on Penelope, and her ponderings on the fate of Hella in Norse myth.
I enjoyed pretty much all of them, though; they all felt like they were at exactly the length the idea required, which can be a really annoying thing with short fiction.
Rating: 4/5
Sounds like an intriguing collection
It really is! Several different ‘areas’ of mythology, some of which weren’t super familiar to me.
Oohh, this sounds interesting, I love mythology and having different areas of them incorporated into the stories sounds even better! This also reminds me that I haven’t finished reading the Lady Trent series and I need to get on them asap!
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I really liked it! And yeees, I love the Lady Trent series. There’s an illustrated special edition coming via Kickstarter and I’m very excited.