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★★★☆☆ A couple good stories, some not so good, and one truly awful

Fire Watch

Connie Willis

This anthology, like most anthologies, was a very mixed bag. I enjoyed the title story, "Fire Watch". I would have enjoyed it more if I had read Connie Willis' Blitz novels Blackout/All Clear recently, but the last time I read them was over two years ago, and at my advanced age, that doesn't count as recent. Still, good story. The final story, "Blued Moon", was a delight -- very funny, the kind of thing I expected from Willis.

Then there were a bunch of stories that could have been good but were told in an unnecessarily annoying way. Willis likes to withhold information from the reader, setting up a mystery to be revealed at the end. Most authors do this, of course, but she is terribly transparent about it, in the sense that you don't understand what's going on until the last two pages, and you KNOW you don't understand, and are just massively confused. The result is that the surprise ending is not really a surprise -- you knew all along that there was some horror to be revealed -- you just didn't know the details.

Then there's "All My Darling Daughters". It was truly awful. I don't mean it was poorly written. Without getting specific, imagine, if you can, a story that lives in the moral and narrative vicinity of Nabokov's LolitaSturgeon's Bianca's Hands, and Süskind's Perfume, and then try to imagine something even more morally repulsive. I read all three of those without serious physiological difficulties, but "All My Darling Daughters" squicked me out. So congratulations, Ms Willis, I guess.

Now, I try to judge books by their strengths, so I ought to rate an anthology with two good stories on the high side. But "All My Darling Daughters" was so repugnant I feel I have to knock off a star.

Amazon review

Goodreads review
 

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