★★☆☆☆ Train-Yard Blues

Train-Yard Blues

Seanan McGuire

First, a disclaimer. I am not really reviewing Coins of Chaos. I read only the preface and one story, Train-Yard Blues, by Seanan McGuire. For most of 2022 I have been engaged on the project of reading all of McGuire's published fiction. This was, when I read it yesterday evening, the last story of McGuire's I knew of that I had not yet read. My project is not finished, however, because last night at 21:08 she released her Oct-2022 Patreon reward, the story "How to Bake a Pie". Of course I knew that would be coming, so I knew last night that I wasn't really finished yet. But I will be, this evening, until I come across another story that I somehow missed.

So, Train-Yard Blues. It is a Ghost Roads story, that is, it is a story about Hitchhiking Ghost Rose Marshall. I like Rose a lot, so I had high hopes for this. However, it let me down. Rose gets one of the coins mentioned in the book title and a bunch of dangerous spectral thingies chase her around on a train. There is almost no plot aside from Rose getting chased, and we don't get much of her sparkling personality.

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