niriop
1/19/2021
I had wanted to read this for years, but in actually getting around to it, I'm sad to say it didn't live up to what I expected.
Similar to Atwood, but more so, Carter often kind of gets lost in her own prose--now to be sure there are moments of great prosaic beauty, but also of prosaic stodginess. In the end, it took me ten months of dipping in and out until I was finished.
I'd say that the title story and "Puss-in-Boots" are the best in the collection, with "Snow Child" and "The Werewolf" providing more traditionally fabulisitc interludes. "The Company of Wolves" was also pretty good, but "Wolf-Alice" was mostly a blur to me (the band who named themselves after the story are better).
There are no "bad" stories in the collection, but in the whole, I just wasn't that excited. For a "feminist" classic, a lot of the romance is fairly conventional--although that may be the subversive point of it.
I will eventually read Carter again, one of her novels perhaps, but not immediately.