A project focused on bringing women's voices to readers and celebrating the stories they have to tell, including stories by Keyan Bowes, Carol Cao, Chelo Diaz-Ludden, Sarina Dorie, Naomi Elster, Jordanne Fuller, Ari Harradine, Karen Heuler, L.S. Johnson, Tonya Liburd, Kelsey Maki, Julia Ray, Patty Somlo, P.K. Tyler, Deborah Walker, Keira Michelle Telford, Kim Wells, Elizabeth Wolf, and Sylvia Spruck Wrigley:
Mosaics: A Collection of Independent Women Vol 1
Buy Your Copy Now! 
Mosaics: A Collection of Independent Women will inspire and shock you with its multi-faceted look at the history and culture surrounding femininity. If gender is a construct, this anthology is the house it built. Look through its many rooms, some bright and airy, some terrifying- with monsters lurking in the shadows.Mosaics Volume One features twenty self-identified female authors writing about Intersectionality, including women of color, and members of the disability, trans, and GLB/ GSD* (Gender and Sexual Diversities) communities. We have curated amazing short fiction, flash fiction, poetry, essays, and art. It’s personal, political, and a great read.
This collection includes Hugo Award Nominees, Tiptree Shortlists, Pushcart Prize Winners, USA Today Bestsellers, indie superstars and traditionally published talents alike. The anthology combines leading and new voices all proclaiming their identity as Women, and their ability to Roar.
My review:
Mosaics: A Collection of Independent Women by Susan Kaye QuinnMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Mosaic is the art of creating images by assembling other smaller pieces together. Mosaics: A Collection of Independent Women is just that. This collection of short fiction, flash fiction, poetry, essays and art, each a beautiful piece, has been curated to present a larger tapestry of what it means to be a woman. Not all of them agree with each other. They're not meant to. But they give you a wider picture of the various things it means to be female.
Beginning with Deborah Walker's The Wax Anatomist's Daughter, which gives you a glimpse of the complex relationship between bother and daughter, and ending with L.S. Johnson's The Queen of Lakes, which weighs a marriage Rose doesn't want against a monster's favour, the anthology explores a variety of topics - relationships, abuse, oppression, choices, sexism, misogyny, power, loss, motherhood, menstruation, lesbianism, independence - from the view point of the women themselves. Women's voices have been suppressed for a long time, and in this anthology, women are standing up to claim back their voices and their spaces.
The Girl made of Glass (Ari Harradine) is a particularly insightful story about how girls are often restrained from their full potential because of fear and the idea that women are fragile. It takes a strong woman to set Attie free from this entrapment, helping her decide to take a risky step towards wholeness - even if it may result in her death.
I enjoyed Kim Wells' Star Girl and Captain Obvious meet the Troll, a funny satire on superheroes, comic books and common tropes, but I couldn't decide whether to sympathise (or totally judge) the poor woman in Julie Rea's Pain Relief whose struggles with the benefits office and her medication is made worse by her weed-smoking habit.
Femina Virtus (Keira Michelle Telford) is a period piece on the suffragette movement, whilst Space Loses its Allure When You've Lost Your Moon Cup (Sylvia Spruck Wrigley) is a hilarious piece about having your period in space.
The Queen of Lakes is a powerful piece to end with: Rose's struggles with the limited options she has are poignant; her parents' fights about allowing her to dream and learn weighed against their ability to support her studies financially are all too real; her brother's betrayal like a knife to the heart.
The debate on feminism (and why it's necessary) is not one that is going to go away any time soon. We need collections like this to continue telling the world what it really means to be female.
* I received a free copy of this ebook in exchange for an honest review.
All profits go to the Pixel Project to end Violence Against Women!
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