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This collection was selected as the group read in one of my groups, as we like to try to do a collection to start off the year. Kind of easing into things, you know. Lots of little stories, generally a lot of discussion going on... nothing too crazy. But the last two years have been a bust for me. I did actually finish last year's selection, but it was not enjoyable.

This year... I'm abandoning ship. It's not that the stories aren't good, or the writing is crap... It's just that I really have lost interest. Quite early in the collection, and mid-story, even. Never a good sign. I left it on my Currently Reading shelf for a long time after I last put it down, hoping that it would call to me... but in 22 days, it hasn't.

This collection was written to raise money for Shawn Speakman's medical bills, and I think that's awesome. It's really a great thing that he was in a position to know people who have audiences and who were willing to put out additional content that those audiences might enjoy and thus buy this collection to read. (Let's also just chat, for a moment, about the ridiculous bullshit medical system we have in the US that makes such measures necessary in order to not bankrupt oneself trying to get healthcare. Because that's not healthcare, it's profiting off of illness, off of the backs of the very people that its supposed to serve. We really need to do better. We pay into a system that doesn't benefit us. Why continue doing something that clearly isn't working?)

Anyway, as the authors in this collection were doing it for a good cause, Speakman was unwilling to dictate what type of stories they should submit. And so, this comes out as a very mixed bag of stories, with no real rhyme or reason to their being collected here, except as an act of generosity.

Apparently, quite a few of the stories are tie-ins to their particular author's larger body of work, and as I have not read many of the authors in this book, it really didn't do much for me. I appreciate tie-in short stories when they are solid enough to stand alone, or when I have benefit of the context of the larger work. And it was hit or miss in that aspect for me.

My favorite story of those that I read was "The Old Scale Game" by Tad Williams. I really enjoyed that, and it was definitely story enough on its own without my having to have ever read Williams before to enjoy it. My least favorite by far was "How Old Holly Came To Be" by Patrick Rothfuss, though I only read 6 stories, and was on the 7th when I just... lost interest.

It goes that way sometimes. Such is life.