***** The Shadow TreeAn amazing opening to the book... familiar fairytale elements combine in unexpected ways, creating a haunting, eerie and poignant tale.This cinder-dark Ella, servant in a great castle, sees to the needs of both the king and the queen, and tells strange stories to their two horrible children. But that's not all she'll do...**** Gallow-berriesThis is a 'prequel' to 'And Sorrow And Such' - here we meet the main character of that novella as a young woman who's just lost her moth...

What a wonderful collection of interwoven stories. More remarkable as it is a debut collection. I absolutely adored reading about the women who populate these (dark) fairy tales.

This was one of the best short story collections I've read in quiet some time. One thing that can sometimes be a pain for me with reading a collection of short stories by the same author is that there winds up being too many similarities between the stories and i become bored and restless (or it might just be bad mythos fiction.) That wasn't the case with these stories at all. The one time I started to feel that way with this collection the next story completely turned me around and had me devou...

Sourdough and Other Stories by Angela Slatter is a collection of linked short stories — or a mosaic novel — similar to The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, but written earlier and set later in the same world.As always with Slatter's work, the writing in this book is gorgeous and the stories women-centric. I have to admit, I read it over the course of a several weeks so I lost some sense of continuity. As a result, towards the end I found myself flicking back to earlier stories trying to r...

I’m a sucker for a good fairy story. And I mean a proper fairy story, where nasty things happen, even to the good people. It makes my teeth flex to see these sanitised Disney fairy tales, where it’s all rainbows and unicorns and bollocks like that, with a final message that all you have to do is believe in yourself. Fuck off. That’s not a fairy tale. A real fairy story is where the witch does eat the children, not when the children outsmart the mean old witch with their goodness and wholesomenes...

Darkly inventive stories that start in fantasy and fairy tale territory, but imbue that material with an element of realist psychological depth and complexity. Gripping and enchanting reading, although I couldn't entirely shake a slight element of semi-goth romance predictability in some of the language and trappings. More than compensated for by the imaginative and original take on the subject matter however.

I opened the package from Tartarus Press the moment it arrived. I knew that I would be compelled to read this little gem right away. So, I took off the dust cover – a habit I picked up after the scary incident of the water spill this Summer – and gasped with awe. Stephen J. Clark‘s stunning image is etched into the hard cover in glorious silver, gold, and brass tones (see picture above). I didn’t think Tartarus could outdo themselves, but they did! I know, I know, you can’t judge a book by its c...

*I received this book in a firstreads giveaway. I don't usually read short stories because I find that there isn't enough space for characters to develop any depth. But these stories were great! Once you've read a few chapters, all the stories start linking together, so that each story seems more like a chapter in a novel. In reading later chapters, you learn more about the stories and characters in previous stories, until they all link up. I really liked the way this book was written - I've nev...

Captivating and intriguing from beginning to end. What an ingenious collection of short stories. What a surprise to discover this collection and the dark work of Angela Slatter. She has a brilliant mind and a true gift of storytelling.

Angela Slatter is definitely on my must-read list now - Loved this almost as much as I loved The Bitterwood Bible. This amazing book of Dark Fairy Tales with a feminist slant feels effortless to read and draws you in from cover to cover. Definitely reminiscent of the great Angela Carter.

16 stories, each skillfully interwoven to one another yet so different. Everyone Dark, chilling and disturbing, though told with a thread of light humour (and occasionally dark humour) running through them. Very observantly written, you can feel yourself there in the setting with them. As a child, I found Fairy-tales to be always unreal, a fantasy, these go beyond that, drawing you into something bordering on believable. Psychologically, these tug at you somewhere deep down, tantalisingly part e...

An excellent Australian writer.

This fantasy book full of short stories has got to be some of the most beautiful that I've ever read, and it's not merely because of the richness of the characters, or of how much thought and careful effort was spent in the crafting of so many different women. Indeed, I don't even love it because so many classic fairy tales were taken by the scruff and were scolded and were transformed as if by magic into things utterly different than their original beginnings, or so altered that we are now livi...

Gorgeous collection. Each of the stories was a beautiful fairytale in itself and the way they all tied together was magnificent. The prose was wonderful, none of the stories was too long, and they all drew from the same source material while remaining astoundingly original. Good fairytales always have a lick of venom in them, and all of these did as well - sometimes inflicted on the protagonist and sometimes on their enemies. But it was always sharp and always appropriate.The spectrum of female

When I read the brilliant novella Of Sorrow and Such, I vowed to read more by Angela Slatter. Well, I’ve fulfilled that vow, and Sourdough and Other Stories turned out to be even better than Of Sorrow and Such. This collection of interlocking short stories is a gorgeously crafted, feminist master piece that would appeal to fans of Catherynne Valente.The stories relate to each other, with characters from one story appearing in others and events in one story rippling to lead to another. I think I’...

Reading this has been a long time coming. I think I've owned it for a couple of years, but I've never quite got there before now... mostly because I knew that once I had read it, I would have read it, and then it wouldn't be sitting there waiting to be read.Yes, sometimes my brain is weird.TL;DR: totally, totally worth it; wonderful and strange and making me moon-eyed. It is indeed like reading those fairy tales that were deemed Not Really Fit for young children and discovering that THAT is wher...

These invented fairytales are all somewhat related, building on characters and lineages from story to story. These tales showcase the tenacity of women. I have to credit Angela Slatter with the fact that her opening lines are always engrossing. I never felt whiplash between stories, only immediate investment.

This is collection of short stories, inter-related in several ways and set at different times. The stories could be fairy tales, indeed one of them is a retelling of Rapunzel, but all from a dark fantasy or horror viewpoint. Myth from our world is liberally sprinkled in, but most of it is brilliantly original.There's witches, trolls, ghosts, spirits, sirens and all sorts of magic, but the stories are always deeply ground in the women that experience them. The stories interleave themes around wom...

Very good overall, but due to the number of stories and the intersecting characters it was mildly difficult to keep track of who was who

In the Afterword to my edition, Jeff Vandermeer basically says everything I could ever want to say about this book and Angela Slatter. First, he brings up Angela Carter - exactly who I think of when I read Slatter (and who, yes, I had a huge reading crush on as a young adult, just like Mr. Vandermeer) - and yet, an author so different from Ms. Slatter.Then, he says - much more brilliantly than I did, when describing this book ineloquently to my husband as 'stories that could be real' - that her