Grasha

See my review/comments, also copied below. I’m not usually a fan of short story collections, and this book didn’t completely change that. A couple of the stories are genuinely excellent and show just how good Harrison can be in the shorter format — sharp, unsettling, and thought-provoking. However, many of the stories felt only okay, often because they seemed to end just as they were becoming truly interesting. I found myself wishing Harrison had spent more time expanding certain ideas or characters. There were also one or two stories that felt flat to me and never quite developed into anything memorable. Although the collection is often labelled as science fiction, only a minority of the stories lean heavily into genre ideas. Most focus instead on relationships, emotional ambiguity, memory, and psychological unease. Where the book consistently worked for me was in Harrison’s atmosphere and prose. Even when a story wasn’t gripping me narratively, his language, rhythm, and striking turns of phrase kept me reading. Overall, while this collection didn’t fully win me over, it did convince me that Harrison is an author worth continuing with — next time, though, I’d rather invest in one of his longer novels where his ideas and characters have more room to develop.