Anna Tambour, Monterra's Deliciosa and Other Tales (Prime Books, 2003)For reasons that would take far too long to go into here, it took me forever and a day to finish Monterra's Deliciosa and Other Tales, which is odd considering it's a book I quite enjoyed most of the time. It's taken me almost as long to get round to reviewing it, and I don't quite understand that, either. It's not like I have anything outrageous to say or what have you. It's a collection of good, solid-if-not-remarkable-most-of-the-time stories that vacillate between fantasy and sci-fi, usually with a dash (or more) of comedy to leaven things. I could have done without the poetry as a whole, and I could have done with a good deal more of the book reviewing (“Literary Titan, Asher E. (huh?) Treat” is my favorite piece in the collection). When Tambour is on her game, as in, for example, “Travels with Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cévennes” (a fantastical story of Stevenson's trip narrated by his pack donkey!), the prose skips off the page and sparkles in your eyes. “Crumpled Sheets and Death-Fluffies,” on the other hand, is a one-trick pony, a shaggy dog joke that goes on a bit too long. And I could sit here giving you balance all day with these stories (“Klokwerk's Heart” vs. “The Refloat of D'Urbe Isle”, “Monterra's Deliciosa” vs. “The Afterlife at Seahorse Drive”, and to be honest after all these months I still can't tell you which side “The Magic Lino” falls on...). In short, it's a story collection, and as with the majority of story collections, the quality is variable. But Tambour is a fine writer (fine enough that I augmented my print edition of this with an ebook edition—and I should caution you there are some formatting quirks to be found here—and then went off and grabbed an ebook edition of Spotted Lily when I was done with this), and she brings her A game to the table enough that this is a solid recommend. ***
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