Yunus itibaren Jalsoo, Rajasthan, Hindistan
I really enjoyed this book. It is a romance with strong characters and a great story line. There are several twists and turns and there are deep emotional issues being worked through by each character.
This is such a fresh look at the way two people love one another. It wasn't as great as I had hoped, but I did really enjoy it. The punk aspect was kind of fun, too.
Some of the stories are amateurish (I assume because they were trying to achieve some sort of balance, by age, geography, race, whatever), and several of them are only "fantastic" in the vaguest way and would be perfectly at home in a mundane anthology. Two fanfic stories: one on Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (not impressive; too much 'oh, get a load of this, this is gonna be sooooo creepy, you won't believe it,' so that when it's finally revealed, though it's deeply creepy, it's still anticlimax; would have done better to underplay) and one on Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (can't judge; haven't read the original; nice voice, but definitely has the feel of something that's in dialog with the canon). Way too much New Orleans; aren't there any other Southern cities fit to be the setting for the fantastic? Charleston? Galveston? Standouts: Marian Carcache's "The Moon and the Stars," which involves voodoo (as far too many of them do) but does it in an interesting way; Kelly Link's "The Specialist's Hat"; Michael Bishop's "The Yukio Mishima Cultural Association of Kudzu Valley, Georgia" (I hadn't even known he wrote comedy), Kalamu ya Salaam's "Alabama" (a meditation on suicide and lynching, but not speculative in the least); Lynn Pitts' "Tchoupitoulas Bus Stop" (a nice compact ghost story), Daniel Wallace's "Slippered Feet" (the one with the language tape that comes to life), Sena Jeter Naslund's "The Perfecting of the Chopin Valse No. 14 in E Minor" (nicely vivid mother-daughter relationship).