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Second Helpings: An Anthology with Recipes
Women Who Write With Elves offer a second volume of new writing by the same group of emerging writers who are still scattered from Scotland to Switzerland.Read these stories of love and hate, isolation and family, grief and happiness and try out the accompanying recipes that reflect the worlds that are revealed to you.Cuddle up and enjoy...
294 pages, Paperback
Published March 18, 2016
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April 30, 2016
Anthologies are really difficult to rate. I love them for their variety, but it's the variety of course that makes them difficult to rate. I'd put the stories here mostly 3*, but there were some 2* and a good few 4*. Sue Cook's Chapattis with Everything was stand out hilarious, and I also loved her play on Shakespeare's origins, Murder Most Foul. Mairibeth MacMillan's Pitching a Fit was darkly funny with a real bitter little under-taste - I couldn't help but wonder if she had written from personal experience.
In fact, I wondered that about quite a few of the stories, where the details felt deeply personal - the description of the Christmas Eve table in Witches and Whales, for example - I felt as if I was being given a glimpse into the writers' minds. But most personal of all are the recipes. I loved the idea of this anthology, the common theme of cooking which draws the stories together, and the little details of the recipes which make them peculiar to the writer. They are all included at the back of the anthology too, and I've tried a few already.
One other common theme - probably not deliberate - which ran through many of the stories was a neatly-tied up and often slightly moral ending. I liked this less. I felt that there were some stories which would have been better left short, leaving the reader wondering - for me, short stories are vignettes, snap shots, rather than truncated full-length stories. I really enjoyed The Shop at St George's Cross, for example, but the ending felt so rushed, it made me want to know the full story - and that made me think that in a short story, the ending should maybe have been left up in the air. This may just be me of course!
This is a nice 'dip in and out' type of book, if you're prepared to accept that you'll like some better than others - and isn't that the point of an anthology, to sample? - then I say go for it!
In fact, I wondered that about quite a few of the stories, where the details felt deeply personal - the description of the Christmas Eve table in Witches and Whales, for example - I felt as if I was being given a glimpse into the writers' minds. But most personal of all are the recipes. I loved the idea of this anthology, the common theme of cooking which draws the stories together, and the little details of the recipes which make them peculiar to the writer. They are all included at the back of the anthology too, and I've tried a few already.
One other common theme - probably not deliberate - which ran through many of the stories was a neatly-tied up and often slightly moral ending. I liked this less. I felt that there were some stories which would have been better left short, leaving the reader wondering - for me, short stories are vignettes, snap shots, rather than truncated full-length stories. I really enjoyed The Shop at St George's Cross, for example, but the ending felt so rushed, it made me want to know the full story - and that made me think that in a short story, the ending should maybe have been left up in the air. This may just be me of course!
This is a nice 'dip in and out' type of book, if you're prepared to accept that you'll like some better than others - and isn't that the point of an anthology, to sample? - then I say go for it!
Displaying 1 of 1 review