Other Ever Afters

Magic flowers like knowing when people need them. If you pick one but leave the root, two more will grow in its place.

First of all: the art! Wow, so gorgeous! I spent ages just looking over some pages, taking in all the beautiful details. It's just out of this world.

As for the stories themselves, I enjoyed the overall approach to these short fairy tales, some of them incredibly loose retellings, others more like... original stories built upon familiar tropes. All of them felt original and fresh and gave me some food for thought. Curiously, almost all of them also felt decidedly incomplete. They kept ending right when things got really, really interesting and I wanted to know what came next! The only two exceptions for me were The King's Forest (the very first story in the collection) and New Name. The former had a very open ending, but the kind that felt right and actually finished the protagonist's arc. The latter just felt right all around, and honestly just touched me so deeply. Definitely my favorite of the bunch.

There are quite a few other stories I found memorable. The version of The Goose Girl here has some interesting ideas going for it. The central twist of Sweet Rock is incredibly fun and promising, and I keep wishing it was just the beginning of the story, not the entirety of it. Pretty much the same thing can be said about The Fish Wife and The People's Forest (that last one also has a MC with such an interesting inner conflict, as well as fantastic nature imagery/metaphors).  There was also Hsthete, the one story that left me a bit confused with how it played out, and probably the one I would most love to read the non-existent "full" version of. Give me more trickster gods and weird mishaps! 

All in all, a very interesting collection, and I just need to say this one thing one more time: THE ART. It's so, so lovely.