So it turns out that I have downloaded/bought about eleventybillion titles for my Kindle and read less than half of them (I don’t feel too guilty about this, because books and also because a lot of them were freebies). Despite that lack of guilt, I’ve decided I need to go through and, well, make my way through all of them.
At least in this case it wasn’t a total mistake.
As y’all might guess from my username, I’ve a bit of a fondness for tricksters in general and Coyote in particular. Not all of the stories in this collection are about that particular trickster, but I think they all — even the ones I didn’t particularly care for — captured that old trickster magic and its often ambiguous nature.
The problem I’m having in writing this review, however, is that none of them have particularly stuck with me, for good or ill. I don’t recall wanting to skip ahead from the middle of one story to the next, so there’s that; and I enjoyed the Ellen Kushner story in the middle of it all even if I didn’t remember the character from the Riverside books (oh, side note: I have no idea why Amazon has this sub-titled “The World of Riverside” because there is only the one Riverside story). Some of these worlds are likely not ours, and some might be the one we live in, but Trickster is Trickster. I can recommend this, if you like trickster tales or collections of short stories, but it wouldn’t pop right to my lips as an example of the genre.
I wanted to like this collection, I did — but, increasingly, I’m finding that even though I tend to write short stories I don’t much care to read them.
