Seasons of Glass & Iron

by Amal El-Mohtar

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories
Pages: 196
Rating:

Synopsis:

With confidence and style, El-Mohtar guides us through exquisitely told and sharply observed tales about life as it is, was, and could be. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose.

Full of Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Hugo Award-winning and nominated stories, Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories includes "Seasons of Glass and Iron," "The Green Book," "Madeleine," "The Lonely Sea in the Sky," "And Their Lips Rang with the Sun," "The Truth About Owls," "A Hollow Play," "Anabasis," "To Follow the Waves," "John Hollowback and the Witch," "Florilegia, or, Some Lies About Flowers," "Pockets," and more.

Seasons of Glass & Iron is a collection from various different times in Amal El-Mohtar’s writing career, and it’s surprising that they all fit pretty well together in light of that. Of course you don’t expect short stories to all be about the same thing, anyway, so that helps — but sometimes in collections like this that come from different times/were written for different purposes, you can really feel the disjointedness. That isn’t the case here.

I do enjoy El-Mohtar’s writing style, which helps, and knew I wanted to read this from a preview in the advance copy of The River Has Roots; it was nice to settle in and read the full collection, and there were several stories I really liked; ‘John Hollowback and the Witch’ is a fun one, and ‘Their Lips Rang With The Sun’. I was also interested in the story based on the Welsh story of Blodeuwedd, and would’ve loved some commentary on that and what provoked it, why Blodeuwedd felt like the right mythical source to use, etc.

I admit some of the other stories interested me less (like the one about pockets, since it didn’t quite feel like it really went anywhere?) and I wasn’t thaaat interested in the poems (at least in this context; it feels weird swapping between forms like that, for me!) — but overall, a good collection and one I enjoyed.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)