Whitstead Harvestide: A Speculative Anthology by Abigail FalangaMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This took me a long time to get through, partially because I took a long time in between stories.
It's an interesting enough collection of short stories that centres around a small English town called Whitstead in the 1800s, at harvestide...or All Hallows Eve. And it's also a "speculative" anthology, which means that all the stories deal with the fantastical, whether that's pure fantasy, fairy tale, folklore, science fiction, paranormal, horror and so on.
So on one hand, it's a really great sampler of short works by a wide range of authors who write in very different styles across a swath of speculative fiction subgenres... but it also doesn't quite gel together as a collection for me. Whilst there are some recurring characters across the stories and they all DO centre on the same location, each piece felt like a disparate stand-alone story. There's apparently a first Christmas anthology of this, where most of the characters were introduced--maybe if you've read that first this would be more appealing and slightly less confusing. (Some stories refer to events that happen prior to this, which I believe were in the first collection.)
Short stories read for the #2023TBRchallenge:
- The Guardian and the Golden Gathering
- What Once Was Lost
- Locusts and Lanterns
- Ollie and the Saints
- The Battle is the Lord's
Total: 5.
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And that's 5 shorts from the 2023 Booktempter's TBR reduction challenge... 23 more to go! whoops.
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