It's some time I picked up an anthology, and picking up this one reminded me how much fun it is reading one, surfacing from one story and diving into the next one, curious as to what surprises it may hold. They are very different from each other, but none of the eleven stories on 363 pages really disappoints. Three, "Moons of Blood and Amber", "The Coming of the Fourth Dawn" and "Crossing the Distance", are genre-type fantasy, where the last one, a novella of 74 pages, is particularly gripping: please, Erin MacKay, give the world a novel! Ginn Hale's 78 pages "Feral Machines" is a SF story I did not expect in this volume, it has an interesting, preservationist setting, though its love story is perhaps a bit cheesy, and the idea to turn cyborgs into, well, pets, would have profited from a little more drama (what use is freedom if everybody remains well-behaved? shouldn't we expect a bad conscience or similar reaction when the freed machines realize to what awful uses they were put before?). Astrid Amara's two short stories are little masterpieces, and I am looking forward to her novel "The Archer's Heart" scheduled to appear in August. All in all, I enjoyed this anthology probably more than any novel I recently read, so I just want to say thank you for it.
