Collections like this remind me why I keep trying short stories! Most that I try don’t work for me, but I really enjoyed this collection. Yap knows how to write an engaging, full story with few pages. I also loved the fantastical element in all of them.

I think my only little complaint is that A Spell for Foolish Hearts felt ill suited to this collection in tone. It’s sweet and silly compared to the other dark stories. I still enjoyed it! It’s basically romcom, so I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed it. It has a miscommunication trope which kills me but it was really sweet.

A Canticle for Lost Girls, Only Unclench Your Hand, and Asphalt, River, Mother Child were my favorites. Only Unclench Your Hand had some really disturbing imagery that I thought was very effective despite it not being visual!

“Truth was a rare commodity among us; it so often meant visceral humiliation. And it was hard to be truthful when we barely knew ourselves in the first place. Truth require scraping away the hard shell of combat weariness we’d gained over years of surviving our girlhood and each other, to get to the strange softness of who we actually are underneath.”