THREE KINDS OF TRAVEL-TIME READS: The Bowery; David Mogo, Godhunter; Disasters at Sea

THE BOWERY: The Strange History of New York's Oldest Street
STEPHEN PAUL DEVILLO
Skyhorse
$16.99 ebook editions, available now

KINDLE EDITION ON SALE NOW! $1.99 (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: It was the street your mother warned you about—even if you lived in San Francisco. Long associated with skid row, saloons, freak shows, violence, and vice, the Bowery often showed the worst New York City had to offer. Yet there were times when it showed its best as well.

The Bowery is New York's oldest street and Manhattan's broadest boulevard. Like the city itself, it has continually reinvented itself over the centuries. Named for the Dutch farms, or bouweries, of the area, the path's lurid character was established early when it became the site of New Amsterdam's first murder. A natural spring near the Five Points neighborhood led to breweries and taverns that became home to the gangs of New York—the "Bowery B'hoys," "Plug Uglies," and "Dead Rabbits."

In the Gaslight Era, teenaged streetwalkers swallowed poison in McGurk's Suicide Hall. A brighter side to the street was reflected in places of amusement and culture over the years. A young P.T. Barnum got his start there, and Harry Houdini learned showmanship playing the music halls and dime museums. Poets, singers, hobos, gangsters, soldiers, travelers, preachers, storytellers, con-men, and reformers all gathered there. Its colorful cast of characters include Peter Stuyvesant, Steve Brodie, Carrie Nation, Stephen Foster, Stephen Crane, Carrie Joy Lovett, and even Abraham Lincoln.

The Bowery: The Strange History of New York's Oldest Street traces the full story of this once notorious thoroughfare from its pre-colonial origins to the present day.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've lived in or near New York City for twenty-five of my sixty-*cough* years. I'm not surprised that I'm still learning stuff about my home town. And considering the astounding difference between the 1980s New York I moved to and the gentrified, sanitized Newyorkland it's become, I have no trouble relating to Author DeVillo's interesting browsing-book's premise of the many streets that Manhattan has called "The Bowery" over the centuries.

Exhaustively researched...the Bibliography and Endnotes will swell your TBRs, fellow New Yorkophiles!...and anecdotally presented, this is a perfect holiday-weekend-travel book. I call them "browsing books" because you can set it down at any point, pick it back up and take right up from where you left off. More than trivia lists, less than in-depth formal Histories, this is exactly what a beach bag or backpack needs loaded on your Kindle to stave off wait-time boredom.

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DAVID MOGO, GODHUNTER
SUYI DAVIES OKUNGBOWA
Abaddon Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Nigerian God-Punk - a powerful and atmospheric urban fantasy set in Lagos.

Since the Orisha War that rained thousands of deities down on the streets of Lagos, David Mogo, demigod, scours Eko’s dank underbelly for a living wage as a freelance Godhunter. Despite pulling his biggest feat yet by capturing a high god for a renowned Eko wizard, David knows his job’s bad luck. He’s proved right when the wizard conjures a legion of Taboos—feral godling-child hybrids—to seize Lagos for himself. To fix his mistake and keep Lagos standing, David teams up with his foster wizard, the high god’s twin sister and a speech-impaired Muslim teenage girl to defeat the wizard.

I CHECKED THIS DELIGHT OF A BOOK OUT OF THE LIBRARY. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY...USE THEM OFTEN!

My Review: ...and then I ran out and bought one so I could dip in and out, savoring my time with David Mogo the demigod with family problems, money problems, and a new job...freelance godhunters can't be all that choosy!...that he just *knows* is very, very bad luck and news.

I'd like to see the "controversy" about the Lagos setting and the use of Naijá dialect sometimes, plain Colonial English others, all sent to the bin for incineration, please. Most of the folk doing that whining are also guilty of whining about human beings in the US *daring* to speak Spanish or Vietnamese or whatever isn't familiar to them. Yes, dear, we know that when you're Privileged others having parity feels like an attack. You'll get used to it in time, and discover how enthralling it is to be inside somene else's world for once.

And it isn't like you've spent time whinging about learning what orcs are, or how to pronounce "Boba Fett", or that Han understands Jabba een though we don't...so let's just cut through the padding and call this what it is: Racism. Face it so you can start to fix it. And that is something you badly need to do.

The godpunk elements of the story...the facts of David's existence, the rain of gods that's seriously plaguing Lagos...are the real draw to this Continental-Op-in-Urban-Fantasy tale. We've got beaucoup examples of urban fantasy with old-fashioned loner/fixer PIs in them. Chicagoland has Harry Dresden, San Francisco has Toby Daye, New York City has Charlie Parker, Kaaro in a different Lagos, and the list goes on. I hope we can add David Mogo to this list permanently, with more adventures to come.

The novella length is tailor-made for use in lines, on planes, in trains and cabs. You can take your time with the read, of course, but you can also read novellas in quick hits. It's the most brilliant thing to happen in technology's long, ugly slide into surveillance, the presence of a reading app on every device you drag with you everywhere you go.

I was always amused, as I read the book on the town's boardwalk outside my building, at the responses of young Black people to my elderly white-beareded face shoved into the book. Several asked me why I was reading it, and after a few minutes of my gushing description of David hunting the godling in the cistern and how absolutely wonderful that scene would be on film, made polite noises and skedaddled.

Heh. *Still* scarin' the straight folk at sixty*ahem*!

As the Memorial Day travel weekend is here, with our new freedom from Plague restrictions I expect lots of y'all will travel. Take Doctor Suyi's David with you for the ride. Best $6 I've spent...on a book I've already read!


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DISASTERS AT SEA: A Visual History of Infamous Shipwrecks
LIZ MECHEM
Skyhorse
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The stories behind over sixty historical shipwrecks, with extensive illustrations.

Whether they’re caused by rough weather, human error, collision, piracy, or mutiny, shipwrecks are fascinating stories filled with history and human drama. This book reveals the facts behind numerous catastrophes around the world, and legends, myths, and mysteries of the sea from ancient to modern times—including widely known disasters such as the Titanic and Andrea Doria, as well as the cases of:
The San Agustin
The 1715 Treasure Fleet
USS Monitor
The Endurance
SS Edmund Fitzgerald
RMS Empress of Ireland
The Henrietta Marie
HMS Bounty
The Mary Celeste
The General Slocum
The Flying Dutchman
And many more
Includes detailed maps and shipwreck locations

I BORROWED THIS BROWSER'S DELIGHT FROM THE PRIME READING LIBRARY AT AMAZON. INCLUDED WITH PRIME!

My Review: It felt a bit odd to recommend a book of shipwrecks on a travel holiday blog post. I'll tell y'all what, though, it's nowhere near as odd as recommending a reader go spend yet more money than they already are on a holiday travel weekend...and thus this free-to-read recommendation.

This is eye-candy, pure and simple. Of course there is a bibliography, de rigueur in modern publishing, and it also has a very nice Index with hyperlinks to the subjects! It's really designed to be a picture book though, a lovely ornamental thing; those fare notoriously poorly on the Kindle. The small screen, the limited graphics capability, the inevitable awfulness of publishers' preferred Satanic nightmare, the PDF, playing badly with Amazon's technology so no one will be able to enjoy them. UNLESS you've sprung for a Fire tablet.

Now we're cookin' with gas.

Skyhorse, this book's publisher, has landed in the news here lately for their determinedly contrarian actions. What I think of that isn't meant for this occasion. What I think of their willingness and apparent ability to make illustrated history and nature and such-like ebooks available inexpensively and in formats that play well with Amazon's tech is entirely laudable.

This book is designed for browsers. There are call-out boxes labeled "Flotsam and Jetsam." There is beautiful chapter-opening art:

Shipwreck on a Rocky Coast, Wijnand Nuijen (1837)—from Wikimedia Commons...opens Chapter 2, "The Fatal Flaw"

I think that's pretty much the perfect tone for art I'm happy to look at for holiday travels taken in crowded modern conditions! And the chapters have self-contained stories about the events leading up to, surrounding, and following the shipwrecks; there are trivia sidebars about people, places, and inventions (lots of inventions! Mel Fisher's "mailbox," invented to seek the treasure galleon Nuestra Se&ntil;a de Atocha in the Florida Keys, is by itself worthy of a book) related to, stemming from, or causing (in a few cases) the shipwrecks.

The famous wrecks...the Titanic and the Mary Celeste and the Indianapolis are all there. The freshwater sinkings of the General Slocum:

The General Slocum burning in the East River, 1904...contemporary photo via Wikimedia Commons

...and the Eastland and the Sultana. All those get their due; the memories of stories half-heard on TV shows about ancient aliens and the like get their proper debunking in sections on the Bermuda Triangle; the pirates of the Caribbean (not the Mauschwitz version!) and their Queen Anne's Revenge sagas are touched lightly on. No tum, sodomy, and the lash for this book!

*sigh*

Arctic and Antarctic exploration losses like the Endurance in Antarctica and the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus of the newly re-remembered Franklin Expedition (if you haven't watched the TV show The Terror, load it up now!) all come in for scrutiny as well. I am always down for a mental trip to the icy parts of the world in summertime:

The Sea of Ice, Caspar David Friedrich (1824)—Wikimedia Commons again
Doesn't that just take the Curse of Summer right off your mind? Pity it can't act like sunscreen too.

A bit of attention goes to the supernatural-tinged stories, like that of the Flying Dutchman, but there we go...must sell books. And buy them we must, too, of course...but if cash is tight and the various travels have stretched the plastic a bit too far, procure this fom Prime Reading.

If you're traveling, in spirit or flesh, I wish you godspeed and urge you to spend a bit of time, in bursts as long or as short as you need them to be, with a lovely, informative, and entertaining companion...a book.

ON THE TWELFTH NIGHT, a blazingly creative finish to Monstrous Little Voices

ON THE TWELFTH NIGHT
JONATHAN BARNES (Monstrous Little Voices #5)
Abaddon Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Anne Hathaway – contented wife of a glovemaker and aletaster, proud mother of three – has her life turned upside down when strangers, oddly familiar, come to her door and whisk her husband away. What is their business, this terrible danger they say we all face? What is the lattice, and what part must her Will play to save it?

Monstrous Little Voices is a collection of five short novellas, a single long tale set in Shakespeare’s fantasy world of fairies, wizards and potions, in honour of the four-hundredth anniversary of the Bard’s death.

My Review: Imagine yourself in Jonathan Barnes's shoes: you're invited to participate in making an anthology of prose extensions and reimaginings of playwright William Shakespeare's retronymed Tuscan Wars fantasy universe. The editors are hotshots. The publishing house is terminally cool. This sugar/adrenaline bolus would lead any writer to need immediate doses of Ritalin and insulin. Then comes the dose of ricin, the silver hammer this collective Maxwell brings down on your head:

You're wrapping the main narrative thrust that four gifted and talented other authors shaped and directed into a satisfying conclusion, and you're doing it as a response to Twelfth Night.

Holy shitsnacks. *I* can feel writer's block coming on out of sheer terror.

In my review of Adrian Tchaikovsky's EVEN IN THE CANNON'S MOUTH, I called attention to Helena's description of a "place between the pages of the world's book," as a central factor in making all five of these novellas make sense (something modern audiences insist on, silly buggers) as a universe. Clearly I don't know if that conceit is original to Mr. T or if it was part and parcel of the pitch to the authors. I therefore claim no special knowledge of the origins of "the lattice" either. The two conceits seem to me to be different points of view on the same underlying reality. Whoever thought this up, however it was disseminated to the writers, it is a piece of bloody brilliance that knits up many raveled places in Shakespeare's own fictional playhouse-cum-universe. It is, in fact, a small bell-ringer for me as part of the explanation of Shakespeare's troubling and sudden blooming into a major talent from humble, nay untermensch dimensions lowly, beginnings.

And Jonathan Barnes plays it for all it is worth by describing it from the standpoint of the most innocent imaginable bystander: abandoned wife Anne Shakespeare. Oh my, how bold and perceptive a narrative choice. Anne is always, in every imaginable way, the unwinner of every iteration of Shakespeare's fame. Read Robert Nye's take on her, MRS. SHAKESPEARE: The Complete Works. Her fictional memoir is as affecting in its portrayal of a loud, vibrant, lively fun-loving woman as Barnes's is in portraying Anne as a passionate woman in love with a restless man. Both takes, along with so many others written over the course of centuries, require Anne to sacrifice herself to Will's outsized persona.

Only in this novella, an entire playwright's canon of pathos is loaded onto Mrs. Shakespeare's broad shoulders:

Afterwards, they went inside and they sat by the fire and they talked of the life that was left to them, and for a little while, they thought not of the past at all, but only of the future.

EVEN IN THE CANNON'S MOUTH, fourth novella in Monstrous Little Voices and a follow-on tale to Shakespeare's As You Like It

EVEN IN THE CANNON'S MOUTH
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY (Monstrous Little Voices #4)
Abaddon Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Illyria’s Duke Orsino has raised new, powerful allies, and in a last-ditch attempt to win the war, Don Pedro and his brother John, wise old Jacques and the physician Helena sail to Milan to appeal in person for the wizard Prospero’s aid. But unseasonal storms drive them onto the Illyrian shore, and into the hands of their enemies...

Monstrous Little Voices is a collection of five short novellas, a single long tale set in Shakespeare’s fantasy world of fairies, wizards and potions, in honour of the four-hundredth anniversary of the Bard’s death.

My Review: Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis close to being my tippy-top very-best favorite in the collection! It is not because of any lack or failing that Tchaikovsky's entry comes in at 0.999999999999 of 1 in my affections, it is the happenstance of placement. This fourth of five novellas takes on As You Like It, a dear favorite play of mine; but the tale does so very near the close of the collection's business, and so is constrained to bring major thematic strands together while working within the conceit established for the whole endeavor.

A lesser writer would be sunk by meeting these rigorous demands. Tchaikovsky makes doing so look effortless and makes his audience chortle, snicker, giggle, and all while mopping away strange bits of moisture from the corner of the eye. No idea where those came from. But here's the rub for me: I sense that there was a lot, nay a plethora, of material that Tchaikovsky whipped in to the crème Chantilly that is Even in the Cannon's Mouth and was compelled to jettison it to serve his multiple masters.

I realize I could be completely wrong, Tchaikovsky isn't an intimate of mine and doesn't confide his secrets to me; but read this:

"You are most kind," Viola spoke over him. "And pray, will you not join us, who has such respect for learning?"
They passed some moments exchanging compliments, then sent the noble Spaniard off for more mugs, consigning him to the seven-deep scrum about the tapster. Viola let Feste ramble, watching the two foreigners try to follow his baffling loops of logic. At last she said, "Aye, we two are belike the foremost men of learning in all Illyria, and yet you see how fortune treats us! I myself have converse with angels and airy spirits most nights, and have studied with no lesser man than Doctor Dee, while Father Topaz has honed his craft in the invisible college of Verrucoporcus and conjured the stone philosophical. It has been many a cold week since last a stranger showed kindness to two poor scholars such as we."

This grace note off the mash-up within pastiche inside hommage shows the attentive reader just how much pruning must have gone into keeping this novella a novella and not a stonking tome. (Saint Quinculencus? HA!) A mind this well furnished and a spirit this inclined to playfulness must be severely disciplined to keep things concise.

The form Tchaikovsky uses to frame his tale is also an aid in this task. Acts and scenes and stage directions function as a corset does in assisting the costume to cover more fleshed-out bones than it could otherwise. They're in the spirit of the Bard, they're familiar to the audience likely to pick up the book, and they're practical. It isn't a small feat to understand all that and use it so seamlessly for all those purposes that the typical reader passes them all by unthinking.

These passages reveal the immense and demanding task behind the seemingly effortless storytelling going on in the foreground:

"We are between the pages of the world's book. Each scene and moment of our lives is pieced together in this space before it's served to us. We are where none of us was meant to be."

May I just say YES to this? And:

Parolles was still at his fictional Battle of Lepanto. Already he had travelled on a cannonball and hauled himself out of the water by his own hair. Each listener had tried to challenge the lie--Orsino, Don John, and Sir Toby among them--and each challenge he slew, and then piled up the bodies to reach even greater heights of the absurd. Where his words might have taken him, when the newcomers broke in, was past all guessing. Some men, when given rope, refuse to hang themselves but weave a ladder to the moon.

Aside from the humor and the dignity of the passage on its surface, there is in concert with the passage above a deep structural function to those ideas expressed. This becomes more obvious when the book has been consumed whole. But there is something, some gravitic effect like dark matter, that pulls the reader towards these moments and carves their importance on the awareness paid into any work of fiction.

Yet all without any sense of didactic purpose or clanking of barely invisible plot machinery. That, my friends, is the best quality of writing going today.

THE UNKINDEST CUT, Macbeth immortal, The Tempest family dysfunction, and Julius Caesar with the gender roles swapped in true William Shakespeare-meets-21st century fashion

THE UNKINDEST CUT
EMMA NEWMAN (Monstrous Little Voices #3)
Abaddon Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Lucia de Medici sought only to marry, ending a war that has engulfed all the world from Navarre to Istanbul; but she has been lied to, and made into an assassin. Now, armed with new knowledge and accompanied by the ghost of her victim, she sets out to find who so deceived her, and to what end, and to try and restore the damage done.

Monstrous Little Voices is a collection of five short novellas, a single long tale set in Shakespeare’s fantasy world of fairies, wizards and potions, in honour of the four-hundredth anniversary of the Bard’s death.

My Review: Have the hankies ready. There is a reason Newman is known for dark fiction. This is a supremely clever narrative conceit, driven by the fact that even the smartest and most experienced practitioner of an occult art can fall over human frailties like motherhood, misplaced trust, the need to fix people, places, things.

Her mother's face was pale in the lantern light. She looked tired, and older than Lucia liked to think she was. The deep red velvet of her cloak made her look ill in contrast. "Dear heart, I have always told you the truth. I cannot tell you because I cannot see it."
"Have you lost your gift?"
"No."
"You can see the future for others, then, still?"
Her mother's sigh was one of a woman tired beyond words. "Sweet child, rest now."

Unquestioning faith meets unshareable burden. I'm familiar with that.

As burdens go, parenthood's the heaviest imaginable to most mortals. Add in the unfathomable weight of governance. Then top it all with a "Gift" of supernatural power. No wonder la chère Madame sa mère sighs wordlessly. You would too. Adding yet more weight to the burdens Lucia and her mother must carry is the reason that the future must be scryed in the first place: Lucia's impending nuptials to Francesco de Medici will finally, once and for all, put an end to the Tuscan Wars that bedevil this fantasy Mediterranean and draw in the rest of the world, magical and mundane. If they can be brought to their successful conclusion.

So what constitutes success? Do forms have more value than substance? If forms are observed and goals attained by that measure, what cost exacted on the meat-puppets voids success?

Prospero, Duke of Milan, enters the stage with his cruel loss poisoning his never-sanguine personality and clouding his tiny remaining window onto human nature. Lucia's task is to remove him from the stage. Does she succeed in this task if, in accomplishing it, she uses a "One Ring to Rule Them All"-level evil artifact that in its use summons the violent, murderous immortal remains of Scottish King Macbeth to unleash his blood and horror onto the world Lucia's charged with saving?

In the end, the narrative noose that Newman draws about Lucia's neck is clear to the poor child. She has been used by forces far, far more powerful than it is safe for mortal beings to interact with.

Her face was wet and her throat raw. Everything seemed too dull, too slow to be real.
"Yours is not the face of love redeemed," Prospero said, not unkindly. "Take a moment to restore yourself. I fear you grasped that magic's nettle for longer than you should have."

Love redeemed? Love squished under the thundering hooves of the Universe's largest cavalry, yet left breathing and suffering. It is a sadist's delight, this tale. Lucia, standing in for the reader, makes the best decisions she can based on the best and most trustworthy information she has; that the information is unreliable and the decisions terrifyingly misinformed mean that we/she must now suffer the single most painful coming-of-age moment of them all:

You don't matter.

THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE, a prose sequel novella to A Midsummer Night's Dream, the delicious comedic play written by William Shakespeare

THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE
KATE HEARTFIELD (Monstrous Little Voices #2)
Abaddon Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Pomona, a gifted hedge-witch of advancing years in fair Illyria, is walking about her own business when she spies a fairy gentleman trapped in a secret garden. Vertumnus, King Oberon’s emissary to the Duke, has been taken captive by proud Titania, and a war is in the offing... unless Pomona can prevent it.

Monstrous Little Voices is a collection of five short novellas, a single long tale set in Shakespeare’s fantasy world of fairies, wizards and potions, in honour of the four-hundredth anniversary of the Bard’s death.

My Review: A moving, touching, lovely tale of love surprised. Heartfield creates, in Pomona and Vertumnus, a pair of seasoned travelers whose voyages on love's tides have left them on land and grimly content that it be, and remain, so. Neither, however, can resist a puzzle to solve, a clue to pick and unravel into a solution, so when Pomona accidentally sees into Vertumnus's walled prison yard-cum-garden and also through his enchanted appearance as an old hag, she cannot accept that her first vision is not the correct one and that her undignified descent into the enchanted courtyard is not showing her a lie when she sees Vertumnus's haggish countenance. The lie she knows her eyes tell her piques her curiosity, which once aroused is not to be stilled by the shrilling and shouting of tiny Queen Mab playing her role as jailer to the glamoured Vertumnus:

"And if you had seen this man, what of it?" squeaked Mab. "Why seek him with such ferocity? Whenever you think you glimpse a man, you charge toward the place he was last sighted and seek him behind any bush or tree? I advise you as a woman of some years myself: your fond chase will only make your quarry despise you more. Chase cattle, not men. You are, by your looks, not wealthy enough to atone for your wrinkles in the eyes of any man worth the hunting."
The woman set her lips together but said nothing. If she were a trap, sent here by Titania, she must have no awareness of it--or else she could play a part better than any mummer. She had wandered into this garden only to be taunted, to be called ugly and foolish by a bitter old gad-fly.
By Jove, he would prove the little harridan wrong if he were wearing his own appearance.
"You rere-mouse," he scoffed to Mab. "You speak of love as you would of farthest India, knowing nothing of either."
In response, she flew at him, her ghastly team stamping toward his nose. Without thinking, he caught her between his cupped palms for just a moment, but it was just long enough for Mab to work her magic on him. He screamed as pain spread from his feet upwards, all over his skin, and in his mind flashed a strange vision, so that for a moment he thought his prison was not a beautiful garden but a dank stone cell, smelling not of blossoms but of mould. ... Pomona put the book down on the bench and a hand on her hip. "Do not trouble the fairy, madam. She speaks the truth. I know full well I am no beauty. I do not seek a husband, here or anywhere. Show me the way out, then, I will trouble you no more. Where is the gate? I see none."

And so we have the traditional romantic beginning: meet cute, start by being antipathetic to each other, but unite in opposition to a third party. There's a reason that's an evergreen. It worked then as it works now. Get them juices flowin' and then let the underlying chemistry have its turn.

But wait, there's more! After all this novella is a follow-on to one of Shakespeare's most famous romantic comedies. We've already had mistaken identity, ensorcellment, a changeling child's fate revealed, immortality...what's next? Oh yeah! Ignition!

...he was never privy to Oberon's laughing whispers with Puck and his other councillors, and never invited to join the Hunt with the other favourites. He was always more than human but less than spirit.
If he were a true fairy, he would be gone now, off on the air like a sylph, vanished like first love. If he were a true fairy, perhaps--probably--Titania would not have been able to take away the powers she had given him so long ago.
Instead he was bound, and hurt, and limping behind this witch like a pig being led to market.

I don't know about women's feelings on the matter, but to me there is nothing sexier than a man under arrest and/or tied up. No wonder Pomona starts the cross-examination that, as always, elicits the startling details of the male love interest's past which are destined to warm her reluctant heart to him in his pitiable vulnerability. Heartsfield does not stint in assigning pitiability to Vertumnus! Changeling, outsider, neither fish nor fowl...well, what decent heroine could resist that?!

Not his rescuer, that's for sure:

"Truth is truth," she said. "Beneath, above, inward, outward."
"You say that, who saw me as a woman yesterday."
"And were you any different, when I saw you as something else than what you are? Would you have acted any differently than you had? You cannot seek your nature, you can only make it, moment by moment." ... "Then tell me, what is your nature, Pomona?"
"It is whatever I need it to be--or whatever the person paying me for my services needs it to be."
"So simple! But Rumi says the king knows not that he is a king when he sleeps, and the prisoner knows not that he is a prisoner. So what are we, then, when we are sleeping? When we are only ourselves, at night, naked and unoccupied?"
"Are you always unoccupied, then," she said, "when you are naked?"

That loud thud you just heard? Yeah, that was Pomona falling for Vertumnus. He's already fallen for her, his rescuer from Titania's cruel captivity. And now their world trembles because there is no enemy, human or faerie, who can stand against the certainty of mature people in love. It falls to the pair of them to avert the onset of still worse bloodshed in the Tuscan Wars, this imaginary seventeenth-century world war, as soon as they face down the wrath of faerie royalty.

Assuming they survive....

MONSTROUS LITTLE VOICES, a beautiful-looking and beautifully conceived and executed anthology of Shakespearean fanfic

MONSTROUS LITTLE VOICES: New Tales from Shakespeare's Fantasy World
DAVID THOMAS MOORE, editor Afterword by Dr. John Lavagnino
Abaddon Books
$5.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Mischief, Magic, Love and War.

It is the Year of Our Lord 1601. The Tuscan War rages across the world, and every lord from Navarre to Illyria is embroiled in the fray. Cannon roar, pikemen clash, and witches stalk the night; even the fairy courts stand on the verge of chaos.

Five stories come together at the end of the war: that of bold Miranda and sly Puck; of wise Pomona and her prisoner Vertumnus; of gentle Lucia and the shade of Prospero; of noble Don Pedro and powerful Helena; and of Anne, a glovemaker’s wife. On these lovers and heroes the world itself may depend.

These are the stories Shakespeare never told. Five of the most exciting names in genre fiction today – Jonathan Barnes, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Emma Newman, Foz Meadows and Kate Heartfield – delve into the world the poet created to weave together a story of courage, transformation and magic.

Including an afterword by Dr. John Lavagnino, The London Shakespeare Centre, King's College London.

**I BOUGHT THIS TREE BOOK WITH MY VERY OWN UNITED STATES DOLLARS**

My Review: I hereby make an Executive Decision to promote the works of fiction in this collection from stories, as the publisher describes them above, to novellas. Considered in terms of length, I think that's justified, if only barely; it's the depth of storytelling and the complexity of the interrelationships that lifts the tales out of storydom. Admittedly the authors each had a tremendous boost out of the story ghetto by working within the Shakespeare-verse. This has saved a tremendous amount of worldbuilding effort on their part as a certain level of background familiarity can reasonably be expected of readers attracted to the tales. The problems that come with working inside a set of conventions and premises not of one's own creation aren't to be minimized. Honoring the unknowable intent of the original creator, going with or against the tide of the original creator's fan-base's fixed ideas and assumptions about same, while avoiding the artistic death-spiral of checking one's own creative impulse at the door is a feat of no small proportions. Bravo to each and all for navigating these shoals gracefully and successfully.

Equally graceful and successful is publisher Abaddon Books's cover and interior design. The use of period-sourced woodcuts as cover images and interior part-title pages is visually and intellectually pleasing. Woodcuts are shorthand for a rustic or home-made aesthetic, and the ones chosen for use here as well as on the covers of the individually published novellas are appropriately playful in nature. They all capture the spirit of the project whole and entire as well as illuminating certain aesthetic choices made within the illustrated novellas.

I'll review the novellas individually:
–CORAL BONES–THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE–THE UNKINDEST CUT–EVEN IN THE CANNON'S MOUTH–ON THE TWELFTH NIGHT–

The idea of the whole collection merits separate consideration.

And that right there, that little word "collection," is a big reason why the reviews of the parts are different from the whole. Is this a collection? Is it an anthology? I deliberated about that for some time. My love affair with Wikipedia's easily accessed and readily digestible information led me there first, where I found this indirect illumination of the distinction between an anthology and a collection:

Since publishers generally found anthology publication a more flexible medium than the collection of a single poet's work, and indeed rang innumerable changes on the idea as a way of marketing poetry, publication in an anthology (in the right company) became at times a sought-after form of recognition for poets. The self-definition of movements, dating back at least to Ezra Pound's efforts on behalf of Imagism, could be linked on one front to the production of an anthology of the like-minded. Also, whilst not connected with poetry, publishers have produced collective works of fiction from a number of authors and used the term anthology to describe the collective nature of the text.

(emphases added)
A collection, then, is a single-author sampling; an anthology has multiple authors. In the SF/F field there exists a long tradition of themed anthologies from Groff Conklin's many forays beginning in the 1950s all the way through 2016 Hugo-winner Ellen Datlow (for Best Editor, Short Form), and I'm confident that the form will continue into the foreseeable future.

I'll call this book a themed anthology. Its shared premise is that the Mediterranean world of Shakespeare's invention, in which he set many stand-alone comedies and dramas, was deliberately created by Shakespeare as an exercise in worldbuilding. While the modern concept of worldbuilding didn't appear until 1820, we attribute so many powers of prescience and invention to him that this latest one doesn't stretch his legend unduly. Five authors take a play or several plays from this loose grouping of works and, instead of retelling the source material, write prose sequels of sorts to the plays. I've seen several references to these novellas as Shakespearean "fanfic", but the amateurish clumsiness this mildly pejorative and deeply (if unfairly) dismissive term hauls as its baggage is insulting to the fine writers here included. It's factually accurate perhaps, but the connotations aren't.

A collection of Shakespearean "fanfic" is a terrific idea no matter what, one I hope we'll see more of, but this anthology came out tied to the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. Tying the publication of MONSTROUS LITTLE VOICES to such a cultural milestone is genius and I hope the advance sales were monster (which would aid the project in remaining on the backlist forever). If anyone should profit from the Bard of Avon's legend, I'd love it to be modern creative writers working the seams of precious coal he found to invent new and exciting ways to delight and warm us by the collective hearthfire. Fires need fuel. The hottest fires use the best fuel. What better fuel is there than that which comes from time-tested sources? Four hundred years of mining hasn't exhausted this source.

Digital Humanities scholar Dr. John Lavagnino contributed an Afterword to the anthology that provides a clear and concise overview of the aims, sources, and results of the project. It reads to me like a call to arms:

...Pericles returns to a plot resolution {Shakespeare had} used as early as The Comedy of Errors and found fascinating throughout his career: the astonishing reunion with those who seemed lost forever. That particular kind of wonder doesn't appear here, and indeed fits a play better than this book's new kind of exploration. Instead we get the richness of a fictional world that could continue rolling along forever, that could keep leading us to new places and startle us not by returning to our beginnings but by going on and on.

Aux armes (ou claviers), citoyens creatifs!