Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard

[rmc28]

(crossposted from my own blog)

This is a short novella: Amazon says 106 pages, I read it in less than an afternoon. It's dense and bittersweet and comes to a ... hopeful, if not necessarily a happy ending. Thanh is a princess of Binh Hải, returned two years ago from a childhood and early adulthood as a "guest" (hostage) in powerful, northern Ephteria. Now Ephteria has come to put pressure on her home country, and Thanh's former lover, the Princess Eldris, is in the negotiating party for personal as well as expansionary motives. Meanwhile Thanh is haunted by the dreams of the fire that destroyed the Ephterian palace during her stay, and small flames that burn impossibly in her presence.

Highly recommended.

The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories, ed. Margaret Reynolds

[el_staplador]

This is a 420 page doorstop of a book, containing just under a century's worth of prose. The first story is Sarah Orne Jewett's Martha's Lady (1897); the last, Jeanette Winterson's The Poetics of Sex (1993). Despite the title, not everything in here is a short story - there's an extract from Beebo Brinker, and part of a lecture by Virginia Woolf.

It sits very much at the literary end of things, often wandering off into the downright experimental, and I sometimes felt that it took itself a little too seriously. But it took its contents seriously, too, and it was pleasing to see facsimile reproductions of parts of The Ladies' Almanack (which I'm sure is hilarious if one knew any of the ladies) and a comic strip by Alison Bechdel. I'd be really interested to see what might be included in an updated edition.