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The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales
Twenty tales of lust and loss. These stories feature clockwork hearts, lascivious queens, paper men, island circuses, and a flooded world.
• On the island of Skye, an antlered girl and a tiger-tailed boy resolve never to be friends – but can they resist their unique connection?
• In an alternative 19th-century Paris, a love triangle emerges between a man, a woman, and a coin-operated boy.
• A teenager deals with his sister’s death by escaping from their tiny Scottish island – but will she let him leave?
• In 1920s New Orleans, a young girl comes of age in her mother’s brothel.
Some of these stories are radical retellings of classic tales, some are modern-day fables, but all explore substitutions for love.
• On the island of Skye, an antlered girl and a tiger-tailed boy resolve never to be friends – but can they resist their unique connection?
• In an alternative 19th-century Paris, a love triangle emerges between a man, a woman, and a coin-operated boy.
• A teenager deals with his sister’s death by escaping from their tiny Scottish island – but will she let him leave?
• In 1920s New Orleans, a young girl comes of age in her mother’s brothel.
Some of these stories are radical retellings of classic tales, some are modern-day fables, but all explore substitutions for love.
143 pages, Paperback
First published March 3, 2014
47 people are currently reading
4632 people want to read
About the author
Kirsty Logan
80 books1,474 followersKirsty Logan is a professional daydreamer. She is the author of two novels, The Gloaming and The Gracekeepers, and two story collections, A Portable Shelter and The Rental Heart & Other Fairytales. Her fifth book, Things We Say in the Dark, will be published on Halloween 2019.
Kirsty lives in Glasgow with her wife and their rescue dog. She has tattooed toes.
Kirsty lives in Glasgow with her wife and their rescue dog. She has tattooed toes.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 179 reviews
October 9, 2015
This is my first book by Kirsty Logan, and I'm glad I decided to pick up this collection first. If I'm new to an author, I attempt to read their work chronologically, and this was a wonderful debut collection of short stories.
I don't normally read much in the way of fairytales or magical realism, so this collection was a breath of fresh air. I thought it was very well written, with some really beautiful turns of phrase, and I tried to savour it because really I could have read through it in one sitting.
Although I didn't love all of the stories, there were many that I thought were really excellent: my favourites being The Rental Heart, Underskirts (which reminded me a bit of Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters), The Last 3,600 Seconds, Witch, and Matryoshka (among others).
I also really loved the lgbt elements - all relationships, whether between man and woman, woman and woman, or man and man (even woman and robot!) were written with a great deal of emotion and reverance.
I'd urge anyone to pick up this collection, even if it's not genre-wise your cup of tea. I can't wait to read Kirsty Logan's other collection A Portable Shelter, which I already have waiting on my shelf, as well as The Gracekeepers of course!
I don't normally read much in the way of fairytales or magical realism, so this collection was a breath of fresh air. I thought it was very well written, with some really beautiful turns of phrase, and I tried to savour it because really I could have read through it in one sitting.
Although I didn't love all of the stories, there were many that I thought were really excellent: my favourites being The Rental Heart, Underskirts (which reminded me a bit of Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters), The Last 3,600 Seconds, Witch, and Matryoshka (among others).
I also really loved the lgbt elements - all relationships, whether between man and woman, woman and woman, or man and man (even woman and robot!) were written with a great deal of emotion and reverance.
I'd urge anyone to pick up this collection, even if it's not genre-wise your cup of tea. I can't wait to read Kirsty Logan's other collection A Portable Shelter, which I already have waiting on my shelf, as well as The Gracekeepers of course!
November 12, 2017
4.25/5. Kirsty Logan can do no wrong! I absolutely loved her other two books, The Gracekeepers and A Portable Shelter, and after now having read this one, her first short story collection, I can safely say that she's one of my absolute favourite authors.
All of her stories incorporate some sort of fairytale element, a few read like rewrites from well-known fairytales, but most stem entirely from her own imagination, a few could be considered lesbian erotica (which isn't what I usually read, but she made it work!), all are incredibly well-written and leave a lot of food for thought. Speaking of food: My absolute favourite story in this collection was 'Feeding' (heartbreaking and deeply haunting), but I also loved the title story, 'A Rental Heart', 'Momma Grows a Diamond' and 'Una and Coll are not Friends'.
All of her stories incorporate some sort of fairytale element, a few read like rewrites from well-known fairytales, but most stem entirely from her own imagination, a few could be considered lesbian erotica (which isn't what I usually read, but she made it work!), all are incredibly well-written and leave a lot of food for thought. Speaking of food: My absolute favourite story in this collection was 'Feeding' (heartbreaking and deeply haunting), but I also loved the title story, 'A Rental Heart', 'Momma Grows a Diamond' and 'Una and Coll are not Friends'.
July 27, 2016
Kirsty Logan's debut collection of short stories combines magic, fantasy and sexuality, all related in lush, descriptive prose. Across twenty stories, the author uses a wide range of narrative techniques, settings and time periods; some of the tales are a few paragraphs long, others far meatier. There is always an element of the fantastic, but Logan always links this to more recognisable depictions of love and lust. The collection reminded me of Lucy Wood's Diving Belles, which also splices modern everyday life with folklore, and Angela Carter's work. My favourite story from the book, 'Coin-Operated Boys', also made me think of Daphne du Maurier's early stories, specifically 'The Doll'. Some of the stories are too short to be wholly effective, but at their best, they create whole worlds within just a few pages. Original and inspirational, this book made me itch to write my own fairytales.
January 22, 2016
Some exquisitely lovely little tales in this collection. I would especially love to see the Disney film of Tiger Palace, where no one is "rescued" and the two women live happily ever after. The unrequited love retelling of Cinderella is also a hidden gem - a fresh retelling of Cinderella? Really? Could it be? (yes!) - though to be honest there is not a sour note to be found in the whole collection. Bittersweet, yes, and heartbreaking, but not sour. Some tales are better than others, and some are mere moments between heartbeats (but all the better for it, not a single wondrous word is wasted). My only real complaint is that I wanted more, and the book itself , the physical thing is far too light and crammed full to bursting. I wish the designer had given the words more room to breathe.
June 29, 2016
This was just so lovely! I liked all the stories :) coin operated boy and tiger palace were my favourites! :)
Read
January 5, 2019Disconcerting, imaginative, diverse and unforgettable - I am not usually a fan of short stories, but Kirsty Logan’s writing is irresistably readable.
April 5, 2024
Havia oblidat posar que l'havia acabat!!! Clarament super top, m'ha agradat moltíssim, la meva escriptora preferida no decepciona 🎀
June 15, 2016
3.5-I thought this was beautifully written and some of the stories were gorgeous, but in general the collection didn't move me. This might be another case of hype raising my expectations too much. Sleeping Beauty, Coin-Operated Boys, and Matryoshka were probably my favorites.
September 21, 2016
3.5 stars. I borrowed this from the Mitchell Library (which is, frankly, the most incredible bookish place I’ve ever visited). Having read both The Gracekeepers and A Portable Shelter, I already knew that I really enjoy Logan’s writing; she is creative and inventive, qualities which are often difficult to achieve, particularly in the field of contemporary fiction.
As with a lot of the strong short story collections which I have come across, I did not adore every tale here, but I did admire them all, both in the strength of their writing, and the use of literary techniques. Sadly, some of the stories felt a little rushed or unfinished, and several ended a little too abruptly for my liking. A couple of the tales had so much scope, but I do not feel as though their potential was fully realised.
As far as ideas go, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales is fresh, but it is not quite what I was expecting, I must admit. A lot of mystery is embedded into the stories, and much of the time, it was nowhere near as well wrought as it could have been. The whole was rather intriguing, but it does not quite match up to my favourite short story collections, as I thought it may have done when I began to read.
As with a lot of the strong short story collections which I have come across, I did not adore every tale here, but I did admire them all, both in the strength of their writing, and the use of literary techniques. Sadly, some of the stories felt a little rushed or unfinished, and several ended a little too abruptly for my liking. A couple of the tales had so much scope, but I do not feel as though their potential was fully realised.
As far as ideas go, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales is fresh, but it is not quite what I was expecting, I must admit. A lot of mystery is embedded into the stories, and much of the time, it was nowhere near as well wrought as it could have been. The whole was rather intriguing, but it does not quite match up to my favourite short story collections, as I thought it may have done when I began to read.
August 3, 2020
Update March 12th: I am still thinking about some of the stories in this book a LOT, I just loved them so much .. Even thought about making the ranking higher but there were just too many stories I didn't like as much in here ..
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There were 5 star stories in here, and 2/3 star stories in here. I'm giving it 4 stars because I believe that even the 2/3 star stories will stick with me for a while, and I like that, and most of the stories were 4 to 5 stars.
My favourite stories were the title story; The rental heart, Bibliophagy, Coin-Operated boys (loved that one especially), Una and Coll are not Friends and The Gracekeeper (which makes me excited to read The Gracekeepers). Looking back I can name quite a few others that I enjoyed.
The reason I didn't enjoy some of the stories was because I thought there sometimes was too much pointless sexual content. I don't mind it too much if it is needed to make a point in the story, or adds something it would be missing otherwise, but I just didn't feel like it was necessary sometimes.
I'm not sure how to describe these stories, but if you like the slightly odd, whimsical magical-realism type stories i'm sure you'll enjoy this book.
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There were 5 star stories in here, and 2/3 star stories in here. I'm giving it 4 stars because I believe that even the 2/3 star stories will stick with me for a while, and I like that, and most of the stories were 4 to 5 stars.
My favourite stories were the title story; The rental heart, Bibliophagy, Coin-Operated boys (loved that one especially), Una and Coll are not Friends and The Gracekeeper (which makes me excited to read The Gracekeepers). Looking back I can name quite a few others that I enjoyed.
The reason I didn't enjoy some of the stories was because I thought there sometimes was too much pointless sexual content. I don't mind it too much if it is needed to make a point in the story, or adds something it would be missing otherwise, but I just didn't feel like it was necessary sometimes.
I'm not sure how to describe these stories, but if you like the slightly odd, whimsical magical-realism type stories i'm sure you'll enjoy this book.
August 5, 2015
4.5 stars. Delightful, sensual and mysterious. A fantastic collection.
March 18, 2014
In her debut collection, The Rental Heart, Kirsty Logan mixes a steampunk aesthetic with magical realism and a raw sexual energy. The stories move backwards and forwards through time, taking in modern Scottish estates, fin-de-siecle Paris and medieval castles, offering multiple viewpoints and narrative styles. Above all, The Rental Heart is characterised by an audacious imagination.
Logan’s prose is filled with vivid descriptions. One character is introduced as ‘dreadlocked, greeneyed, full of verbs. She smelled of rain and revolution’. Lovers have ‘mouths red and round like quims’. There is life in everything. A radio ‘coughs’ and ‘shouts music’. A sycamore tree ‘gently vomits leaves’. The Rental Heart is obsessed with the tools of writing; a husband, feeling hemmed in by family life, secretly binges on words, while a lonely wife, her husband working away on an oil rig, constructs a lover from paper.
Like Angela Carter, Logan borrows from mythology and folklore, using traditional storytelling techniques to explore present-day dilemmas, explaining the everyday through the fantastical. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, the academic Stephen Pinker used the content of nursery rhymes and fairy tales as a way of illustrating the endemic violence of the seventeenth and eighteenth century societies which created them, a valid point rendered unintentionally comic by Pinker’s pedantic style, as he argued (amongst other things) that the crying girls in Georgie Porgie Pudding and Pie were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (an assertion simply not supported by the text). Fortunately, Logan is adept at using these forms to explain the possibilities and dangers of the adult world.
In her best stories, Logan takes a traditional fairy tale motif, and spins the narrative viewpoint around, re-exploring familiar stories from an unexpected viewpoint. Thus, we have Matryoshka, the tale of a young servant girl who enchants a prince at a fabulous party, seen through the eyes of a spoiled young princess who expected the story to be about her, and an empress in a castle who sets tigers on her would-be rescuers. An early story, Underskirts, concerns a female variant on the Bluebeard character, examined from multiple perspectives, including those of her husband and the servant girls.
Many of these stories feature characters on the cusp of adolescence, and take place in appropriately liminal surroundings. Logan is a fan of the carnivalesque, both in traditional forms such as circuses and balls, and more modern settings, like drunken nights in children’s playgrounds. Her characters exhibit a reckless hunger for discovery; these are not meek Red Riding Hoods, but adventurers who race into the forest to find out what is lying in wait for them. What they find there might not be what we would expect, either. In The Witches, a teenager is dared to go looking for Baba Yaga, by a girl she has been fooling around with. Already heady with adolescent experimentation (‘she had been plying me with her mum’s stolen booze and sucking my tongue on the roundabout in the children’s playground. Everything was spinning so fast’), the narrator marches into the woods, where she loses her bearings, and is aroused by the sight of a couple fucking in the bushes, before stumbling upon the reputed witch’s home. Instead of finding a child-eating old crone, she encounters a woman who can offer her much more than the girl in the playground.
The narrator of The Witches is certainly no naif (‘at sixteen it was very important to be louche’). The same is true of the adventuress in Tiger Palace, a ‘once upon a time’ story of a woman travelling into the jungle, braving reports of alligators and tigers, to try to rescue an empress imprisoned in a palace. The young woman here is far from defenceless. Nature may be red in tooth and claw but so is she, armed with her ‘ten inch machete’ and with ‘no qualms about eating every part of the birds she catches’.
Elsewhere, Logan plays with the idea of technology as a solution to emotional problems. In the title story, a young woman is able to hire a new heart at the beginning of each relationship. At first, they are returned in pristine condition, securing the return of her deposit every time. Later experiences leave her hearts increasingly battered. The story also allows Logan to satirise the fetishisation of gadgetry – each time she visits the rental store, she sees ‘hearts sleeker and shinier than I remembered… as smooth and seamless as a stone’. In Coin-Operated Boys, a woman is able to rent a robotic companion, with the aim of deterring over-enthusiastic suitors, before coming to love the automaton’s deference and vulnerability.
If there is a drawback to The Rental Heart, it is that the collection is not entirely cohesive. Many of the stories have appeared elsewhere, and whilst the range of styles is admirable, it stops the book from becoming a completely immersive experience. Four of the stories were originally broadcast on radio, and are maybe better suited to being heard than read. A couple of other stories, including The Broken West, tone down the magic in favour of a grittier realism, which appealed less to me.
At her best, however, Logan deserves comparison to writers like Jeanette Winterson and Jess Richards for the vividness of her imagination. The Scottish literary scene has produced a series of highly original voices in recent years, such as Jenni Fagan and Kerry Hudson, and The Rental Heart certainly suggests that Logan can stand alongside them.
Logan’s prose is filled with vivid descriptions. One character is introduced as ‘dreadlocked, greeneyed, full of verbs. She smelled of rain and revolution’. Lovers have ‘mouths red and round like quims’. There is life in everything. A radio ‘coughs’ and ‘shouts music’. A sycamore tree ‘gently vomits leaves’. The Rental Heart is obsessed with the tools of writing; a husband, feeling hemmed in by family life, secretly binges on words, while a lonely wife, her husband working away on an oil rig, constructs a lover from paper.
Like Angela Carter, Logan borrows from mythology and folklore, using traditional storytelling techniques to explore present-day dilemmas, explaining the everyday through the fantastical. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, the academic Stephen Pinker used the content of nursery rhymes and fairy tales as a way of illustrating the endemic violence of the seventeenth and eighteenth century societies which created them, a valid point rendered unintentionally comic by Pinker’s pedantic style, as he argued (amongst other things) that the crying girls in Georgie Porgie Pudding and Pie were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (an assertion simply not supported by the text). Fortunately, Logan is adept at using these forms to explain the possibilities and dangers of the adult world.
In her best stories, Logan takes a traditional fairy tale motif, and spins the narrative viewpoint around, re-exploring familiar stories from an unexpected viewpoint. Thus, we have Matryoshka, the tale of a young servant girl who enchants a prince at a fabulous party, seen through the eyes of a spoiled young princess who expected the story to be about her, and an empress in a castle who sets tigers on her would-be rescuers. An early story, Underskirts, concerns a female variant on the Bluebeard character, examined from multiple perspectives, including those of her husband and the servant girls.
Many of these stories feature characters on the cusp of adolescence, and take place in appropriately liminal surroundings. Logan is a fan of the carnivalesque, both in traditional forms such as circuses and balls, and more modern settings, like drunken nights in children’s playgrounds. Her characters exhibit a reckless hunger for discovery; these are not meek Red Riding Hoods, but adventurers who race into the forest to find out what is lying in wait for them. What they find there might not be what we would expect, either. In The Witches, a teenager is dared to go looking for Baba Yaga, by a girl she has been fooling around with. Already heady with adolescent experimentation (‘she had been plying me with her mum’s stolen booze and sucking my tongue on the roundabout in the children’s playground. Everything was spinning so fast’), the narrator marches into the woods, where she loses her bearings, and is aroused by the sight of a couple fucking in the bushes, before stumbling upon the reputed witch’s home. Instead of finding a child-eating old crone, she encounters a woman who can offer her much more than the girl in the playground.
The narrator of The Witches is certainly no naif (‘at sixteen it was very important to be louche’). The same is true of the adventuress in Tiger Palace, a ‘once upon a time’ story of a woman travelling into the jungle, braving reports of alligators and tigers, to try to rescue an empress imprisoned in a palace. The young woman here is far from defenceless. Nature may be red in tooth and claw but so is she, armed with her ‘ten inch machete’ and with ‘no qualms about eating every part of the birds she catches’.
Elsewhere, Logan plays with the idea of technology as a solution to emotional problems. In the title story, a young woman is able to hire a new heart at the beginning of each relationship. At first, they are returned in pristine condition, securing the return of her deposit every time. Later experiences leave her hearts increasingly battered. The story also allows Logan to satirise the fetishisation of gadgetry – each time she visits the rental store, she sees ‘hearts sleeker and shinier than I remembered… as smooth and seamless as a stone’. In Coin-Operated Boys, a woman is able to rent a robotic companion, with the aim of deterring over-enthusiastic suitors, before coming to love the automaton’s deference and vulnerability.
If there is a drawback to The Rental Heart, it is that the collection is not entirely cohesive. Many of the stories have appeared elsewhere, and whilst the range of styles is admirable, it stops the book from becoming a completely immersive experience. Four of the stories were originally broadcast on radio, and are maybe better suited to being heard than read. A couple of other stories, including The Broken West, tone down the magic in favour of a grittier realism, which appealed less to me.
At her best, however, Logan deserves comparison to writers like Jeanette Winterson and Jess Richards for the vividness of her imagination. The Scottish literary scene has produced a series of highly original voices in recent years, such as Jenni Fagan and Kerry Hudson, and The Rental Heart certainly suggests that Logan can stand alongside them.
June 25, 2021
This relatively short book is packed full of stories. I wouldn't call them all fairytales though. Some are fairytale-like, some just have interesting magical elements, some remind me of Angela Carter's short stories. I really enjoyed this collection! The author has quite an imagination.
Individual story ratings:-
The Rental Heart - 3*
Underskirts - 5*
A Skulk of Saints - 3*
The Last 3600 Seconds - 5*
The Broken West - 4*
Bibliophagy - 2*
Coin-Operated Boys - 4*
Girl #18 - 3*
Una and Coll Are Not Friends - 4*
The Gracekeeper - 2*
Sleeping Beauty - 3*
Witch - 5*
All the Better to Eat You With - 3*
The Man From the Circus - 3*
Feeding - 3*
Momma Grows a Diamond - 3*
The Light Eater - 3*
Matryoshka - 4*
Origami - 4*
Tiger Palace - 4*
Individual story ratings:-
The Rental Heart - 3*
Underskirts - 5*
A Skulk of Saints - 3*
The Last 3600 Seconds - 5*
The Broken West - 4*
Bibliophagy - 2*
Coin-Operated Boys - 4*
Girl #18 - 3*
Una and Coll Are Not Friends - 4*
The Gracekeeper - 2*
Sleeping Beauty - 3*
Witch - 5*
All the Better to Eat You With - 3*
The Man From the Circus - 3*
Feeding - 3*
Momma Grows a Diamond - 3*
The Light Eater - 3*
Matryoshka - 4*
Origami - 4*
Tiger Palace - 4*
December 19, 2019
Followers of this blog know that I am a huge fan of Kirsty Logan’s novel The Gloaming and when I am interested in an author, I try to buy everything they’ve published. Hence the reason why I’m reading The Rental Heart, which is Logan’s first short story collection.
The problem is that I had high expectations and I was disappointed.
It’s not that the stories are bad. Themes such as sexuality, notions of gender and general kookiness are present. Also these stories are tight and deliver, even the shortest ones.
The thing is that I thought there was something lacking and although technique is there, I didn’t find any whimsy or that child-like abandon that The Gloaming had.
Obviously I have not given up on this wonderful author – I have The Gracekeepers and her other two story collections and I can’t wait to read them. I see The Rental Heart as a tiny blip.
The problem is that I had high expectations and I was disappointed.
It’s not that the stories are bad. Themes such as sexuality, notions of gender and general kookiness are present. Also these stories are tight and deliver, even the shortest ones.
The thing is that I thought there was something lacking and although technique is there, I didn’t find any whimsy or that child-like abandon that The Gloaming had.
Obviously I have not given up on this wonderful author – I have The Gracekeepers and her other two story collections and I can’t wait to read them. I see The Rental Heart as a tiny blip.
August 6, 2023
I really really enjoyed it. Once again I realised short stories are not really my thing, but this was still a pleasant read. Most stories are about quite serious topics but they're written in a way that still manages to maintain the magic traditional short stories have. Loved "The Broken West", "Coin-Operated Boys", "Una and Coll are not Friends", "Sleeping Beauty", "Momma Grows a Diamond", "Origami" and "Tiger Palace" but tbh I really enjoyed all of them, the only one I liked a bit less was the one that gives name to the book lol
4/5 stars!!
4/5 stars!!
October 5, 2024
V queer, v interesting
December 11, 2022
Rep: sapphic mcs, achillean mcs
October 11, 2025
Every short story felt like a movie where I have to google the title and then “explained” and that made it less enjoyable
January 24, 2016
This is my favorite book I've read in a long time. Logan's prose is magical, gritty, and sexy. I was enraptured from the first page.
September 20, 2020
About:
The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales was written by Kirsty Logan and published in 2014. This is her debut collection of short stories and all have a touch of the magical and fairytalesque. They all feature tales of longing, lust or love in its various forms.
Did I like it?:
Sadly, I wasn’t totally thrilled with this collection. Although there were still stories that I liked. I had read The Gracekeepers previously which I adore, but this didn’t live up to that. However, this short story collection is where she began and I could see her exploring and discovering her style, which was cool!
Favorite stories:
The title story The Rental Heart was good about a place you could rent hearts to save yourself the pain of heartbreak. Underskirts was a favorite, written from different perspectives, all about a woman who hires maids simply for her pleasure and orgies. Surrounding herself with femininity to stave off harsh controlling masculinity. Coin- Operated Boys was in a similar vein to The Rental Heart in that it was about boys you can rent for companionship that have all the perfection that real men don’t. Girl #18 was a good, but sad story about a boy whose sister dies. Una and Coll are not friends was about a girl with antlers and a boy with a tiger tail who have a chemistry they wish they could deny. That story felt full of lust and longing in a tangible youthful way. The Gracekeeper is obviously the short story that inspired The Gracekeepers so that was fun to read. Witch was a twist on the Baba Yaga fairytale filled with coming of age lust that I enjoyed. The Man From the Circus was good about a girl who gets drawn into being a trapeze artist. I saw other glimpses similar to The Gracekeepers in that one. Feeding was one of the best stories in the collection. All about a couple living in the Outback. The woman is barren and so is her land and she slaves away all day until she wastes away trying to ‘grow something’. That story was powerful and well put together. Perhaps the best in the collection. Matryoshka was another one I liked about the unrequited love a princess has for her maid. Origami was a poignant story about a lonely woman who constructs a man out of paper because her husband works on an oil rig and she struggles without him. Last but not least Tiger Palace was a great story about a traveler who goes to a famed castle where an empress lives and they change the story that people tell about that place to suit themselves. Ending with the wonderful line: “But, as it turned out, stories can have any ending you like”.
Do I Recommend This?:
It depends. I really recommend The Gracekeepers to get into Kirsty Logan. If you have read everything else of hers and are quite a fan perhaps getting to see her beginnings and she her trying to find her bearings would be of interest. At the moment I’m thinking her short stories are a way for her to get a bunch of neat ideas out, but that she has mastered the novel. However, that may only be the case with this one. Kirsty Logan in general is for fans of the magical and fairytale inspired.
The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales was written by Kirsty Logan and published in 2014. This is her debut collection of short stories and all have a touch of the magical and fairytalesque. They all feature tales of longing, lust or love in its various forms.
Did I like it?:
Sadly, I wasn’t totally thrilled with this collection. Although there were still stories that I liked. I had read The Gracekeepers previously which I adore, but this didn’t live up to that. However, this short story collection is where she began and I could see her exploring and discovering her style, which was cool!
Favorite stories:
The title story The Rental Heart was good about a place you could rent hearts to save yourself the pain of heartbreak. Underskirts was a favorite, written from different perspectives, all about a woman who hires maids simply for her pleasure and orgies. Surrounding herself with femininity to stave off harsh controlling masculinity. Coin- Operated Boys was in a similar vein to The Rental Heart in that it was about boys you can rent for companionship that have all the perfection that real men don’t. Girl #18 was a good, but sad story about a boy whose sister dies. Una and Coll are not friends was about a girl with antlers and a boy with a tiger tail who have a chemistry they wish they could deny. That story felt full of lust and longing in a tangible youthful way. The Gracekeeper is obviously the short story that inspired The Gracekeepers so that was fun to read. Witch was a twist on the Baba Yaga fairytale filled with coming of age lust that I enjoyed. The Man From the Circus was good about a girl who gets drawn into being a trapeze artist. I saw other glimpses similar to The Gracekeepers in that one. Feeding was one of the best stories in the collection. All about a couple living in the Outback. The woman is barren and so is her land and she slaves away all day until she wastes away trying to ‘grow something’. That story was powerful and well put together. Perhaps the best in the collection. Matryoshka was another one I liked about the unrequited love a princess has for her maid. Origami was a poignant story about a lonely woman who constructs a man out of paper because her husband works on an oil rig and she struggles without him. Last but not least Tiger Palace was a great story about a traveler who goes to a famed castle where an empress lives and they change the story that people tell about that place to suit themselves. Ending with the wonderful line: “But, as it turned out, stories can have any ending you like”.
Do I Recommend This?:
It depends. I really recommend The Gracekeepers to get into Kirsty Logan. If you have read everything else of hers and are quite a fan perhaps getting to see her beginnings and she her trying to find her bearings would be of interest. At the moment I’m thinking her short stories are a way for her to get a bunch of neat ideas out, but that she has mastered the novel. However, that may only be the case with this one. Kirsty Logan in general is for fans of the magical and fairytale inspired.
November 23, 2020
This was a wonderful read. It's kind of hard to explain or categorise this book - the words macabre, sinister and dark come to mind, but none are really accurate or sufficient.
It's a strange, twisty mix of tales. There are dark tales peppered with happier ones. There's a sense of urgency and sadness about a lot of them. I don't really know how to explain them, but if you like fairytale-esque stories with a dark, modern twist, or if you're a fan of Angela Carter then you'd enjoy this book.
It's a strange, twisty mix of tales. There are dark tales peppered with happier ones. There's a sense of urgency and sadness about a lot of them. I don't really know how to explain them, but if you like fairytale-esque stories with a dark, modern twist, or if you're a fan of Angela Carter then you'd enjoy this book.
December 9, 2020
For me this book got better and better...or maybe I became more open minded to the alternative love fables.
Some dark and some a clever twist on a classic. A collection of short stories, with some I adored (Tiger palace, Una and Coll are not friends, feeding,matryoshka) and some I could leave.
Kirsty Logan has a magical way of describing a scene and a beautiful way of creating imperfectly perfect characters.
Some dark and some a clever twist on a classic. A collection of short stories, with some I adored (Tiger palace, Una and Coll are not friends, feeding,matryoshka) and some I could leave.
Kirsty Logan has a magical way of describing a scene and a beautiful way of creating imperfectly perfect characters.
June 15, 2017
Torn between 3 and 4 stars with this book; it's difficult reviewing short story collections! Some were wonderful and definitely worthy of more, but others didn't do it for me. Overall some really enjoyable storytelling that included some great queer fairy tales.
June 26, 2018
Extraordinary. Perfect for fans of The Bloody Chamber and Jen Campbell
March 11, 2019
This is a lovely yet challenging collection of short stories. Each one is beautifully written and is inclusive of anyone. Would recommend!
April 6, 2022
No wait I loved this
December 22, 2022
3.5 stars
October 13, 2024
love the concept and i’m always here for queer fiction, but this just didn’t grab me? perhaps one to revisit down the line, or to read one by one and take longer.
December 31, 2024
A really interesting collection of short stories. Nice and quick, but definitely worth a reread in the future.
My favourites were:
The Last 3,600 Seconds
Una and Coll Are Not Friends
Feeding
Origami
Matryoshka
My favourites were:
The Last 3,600 Seconds
Una and Coll Are Not Friends
Feeding
Origami
Matryoshka
January 6, 2025
3.5? my favorites were una and coll are not friends, matryoshka and especially tiger palace((:
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