Maiden, Mother, Crone, edited by Gwen Benaway

I was directed to this book, published in 2019, to read one specific story, but as I've never before encountered an anthology made up of stories about "fantastical trans femmes" I thought I'd read the whole thing. It's fairly short, eleven stories spread out in under 150 pages.  A few stories were underdeveloped, and clearly by writers still learning the craft. Most were okay or passable stories, but they all encompassed some similarities: the trans protagonists all have a sense of being very special, together with an aggrieved sense of being misunderstood and looked down upon. With one exception, all the males in the stories are there to be evil. One story ("Freeing the Bitch") reads completely like fanfiction--all the boxes of representation and identity are successively checked, as if that is the point of storytelling. The story that was recommended  to me ("i shall remains"--yes the author refuses conventional punctuation and capitalization) was indeed interesting-- a deliberate response to Ursula K. Le Guin's famous story "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas," which is quoted in the  headnote to the story. The book's editor (who also contributed one story) Gwen Benaway described herself as "a trans girl of Anishinaabe and Metis descent"--indiginous peoples of the Great Lakes area of Canada and the U.S. The truth of this assertion was questioned (on Twitter and elsewhere) in 2020, and Benaway has since been cancelled. The publisher of this book, Bedside Press, ceased operations in 2021.  I have no idea if the two events are related, but the book is now out of print and copies are scarce. So it goes. 

The Haunting Season: Eight Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights

The Haunting Season is an odd volume containing eight stories by eight supposed bestselling writers. The writers are seven women and one man. No editor is credited, so one wonders: how did stories get selected for this book? All eight writers are British, and none seem to be especially known on this side of the Atlantic. I've read novels by two of them before, the one by Bridget Collins was reviewed at this site on January 30, 2019. Collins's story opens this volume, and I found it as unsatisfying as her novel. Stories by Imogen Hermes Gowar, Laura Purcell, and Kirin Millwood Hargrave, are somewhat traditional. Stories by Andrew Michael Hurley (the other author I've read before) and Elizabeth Macneal attempt to do something more unusual, but they don't pull it off successfully. The story by Jess Kidd  begins with a photographer called in to photograph an extremely beautiful young dead woman. It pulls the reader in, but soon goes off in tangents, leaving an unsatisfying denouement. The story by Natasha Pulley ("The Eel Singers") is the strangest and most interesting one in the book: odd characters are affected by the landscape and history of an isolated region of the fens. As a themed anthology, the book doesn't work. As a modern example of the ghostly tradition, the book doesn't work. None of the stories are terrible, but none are especially good. Most of them read like first drafts--which could have been bettered with some thought applied to them during revision. A disappointment overall.

Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts) by L.C. Rosen

Religious zealotry is once again operating in full force, as increasingly books are being banned on topics that such zealots deem should be silenced. These include ideas related to race and to LGBTQ issues. Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts) (2018)  by L.C. Rosen is one such challenged title (which I learned of and read because of the nudnik challenges). It concerns a gay New York City high schooler who conducts a (off-school) website sex column while at the same time being stalked and threatened by an anonymous supposed admirer. Books like this which exhibit sympathy and understanding of sexual (and other) minorities should not be banned by myopic zealots, but stocked openly in every high school library.