Review: Fantasy in many settings.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 25, 2012
This book contains four short stories: "Dragon Time", "Wooing Ai Kyarem", "To Act the Witch", and "Princes and Priscilla". Overall, I thought that it was a pretty strong collection. I was a bit surprised by the fact that all the stories had a strong element of romance to them, but that's probably because I went into the author's novel, "Yseult" expecting a lot more romance than there was, and that skewed my expectations.I was pretty impressed with the range of settings described in Dragon Time and Other Stories. The titular story is set in a place like medieval Germany, "Wooing Ai Kyarem" is set in what seemed like Mongolia and Genghis-Khan inspired, and "To Act the Witch" is set in 17th century England. Nestvold was able to capture very different feels in all the stories, and I really enjoyed that.I thought that "To Act the Witch" was the weakest of the stories; the events of the story were too big to be adequately conveyed in such a short story. It felt a bit rushed and not entirely believable. I still enjoyed it, though. "Dragon Time" was a fun story, although it was a bit too romantic for me. "Wooing Ai Kyarem" was one of my favourites; I liked Ai Kyarem and her determination a lot. "Princes and Priscilla" was my other favourite, I also loved Priscilla's way of taking matters into her own hands, and the humour of the story.