This is an absolutely gorgeous collection. There's a rich spirit of experimentation running through each story, of taking bold risks with form and approach, that makes each story a puzzle to be solved, a language to learn. Schanoes cares deeply about politics, history and identity. She cares about the places where those things rub up against each other, where they set fire to each other. There's an appreciation for fairy tale, for folklore, for myth, for how those old stories can help us tell the story of the Right Now. There's so much here that's inventive and unexpected. Just a delightful read.

Highlights: "Among the Thorns" is a delicious revenge folktale. "Phosphorus" is a delight. "Burning Girls" is sublime. And I can't stop thinking about "Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga."

Spooky, dark and often disturbing stories told in beautiful prose. If you enjoy modern fairy tale, you'll enjoy these.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for a chance to read and review.

absolutely spectacular, i loved every single story in this collection. it ranges from the folklore to history to wonderfully gritty urban fantasy, all ruled by fairytale logic and written almost poetically. i loved every story in this collection and can’t wait to read more from this author.

- Nirica from Team Champaca

I received an advanced copy of this book through NetGalley.

Veronica Schanoes's new collection from Tor includes an incredible breadth of work across a span of time and fantasy. The voices that she evokes are mesmerizing, intense, and memorable. I had read two of the included works before: "Phosphorous" and "Burning Girls," both being historical fantasy with resilient female immigrants and an exploration of socialism and corporate injustice. Those two stories alone are well worth the price of this book.

Every story in the collection is taut and well-written, but the historical fiction works are the ones I really enjoyed. "Among the Thorns" is just plain devastating. "Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga" is an intriguing twist on the Baba Yaga mythology. "Phosphorous" and "Burning Girls" I'll mention again, because wow. They epitomize what I feel historical fantasy should be: deep and educational, and enjoyable, too. The other stories in the book were just a bit weird for my personal taste, but that's okay. I loved the book nevertheless because when Schanoes's stories resonated with me, they resonated hard.

This book will be released in January 2021.

First of all, I might as well state my biases. This is a feminist short story collection with queer flavor, and I’m a queer feminist. So, there. Feminist spins on fairy tales, mental illness, worker's rights, immigration and Jewish folklore as well as Jewish persecution throughout the centuries form a cohesive foundation here; these are threads that weave through the entire collection, like trails of breadcrumbs for the reader to follow through each story. Another bias: I have Jewish heritage, but grew up outside any sort of Jewish community, so the folklore elements are really intriguing to me.
With all this in mind, while I do think that I got extra enjoyment out of some of the stories specifically because of these biases, this is a short story collection that I think anyone who wants a good read should pick up once it’s released (March 2021).

This collection starts off incredibly strong with “Among the Thorns”, Schanoes’ follow-up and response to The Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale “The Jew Among Thorns”, wherein the titular Jew’s daughter sets out to avenge her father’s gruesome death at the hands of gentiles. Considering the stark antisemitism that permeates the original story (as well as others found in the Grimm oeuvre), “Among the Thorns” makes for not only a captivating tale of revenge, but a powerful reclamation of the narrative as a whole.

Having been utterly enthralled by this first story, the following two stories, “How to Bring Someone Back From the Dead” and “Alice: a Fantasia” have a tough act to follow, and they didn’t resonate quite as well with me. But they are both very short, and so do not overstay their welcome. This is something that I felt rang true for a lot of the shortest stories in this collection – like they were deeply weird momentary glances into some trauma or other, momentary lapses of sanity, their narratives often oblique in nature. Like maybe I’m not meant to understand them fully, because they weren’t written for me… which is okay, because the longer stories definitely were. All of the stories in this collection are gorgeously written, though, so I still found enjoyment in the shorter ones, despite not feeling as connected to them emotionally. Schanoes shines stylistically – an Associate Professor of English, she certainly knows what she’s doing from choice of words to formatting, and it shows.

In “Phosphorous”, one of the longer stories, we get kind of a horror take on historical events – we follow poor, young matchstick girls suffering from phosphorous necrosis who attempt to unionize for better working conditions and a living wage. The vibe is, of course, very socialist, and Marx is quoted. It’s a harrowing tale of poor people slavery and the human cost of industrialization and capitalism. There are actual horror elements in here, but they take a backseat to the horror that is laissez-faire capitalism. Ten out of ten, comrade.
The theme of the plight of the working class is of course also present in “Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga”, in which we see the legendary political activist Goldman, disillusioned and burdened by years of struggles and betrayed by her own revolution, sit down with the equally legendary witch of the woods. Half of it reads as a history lecture, the other as a fairy tale, and both are equally interesting. I loved the concept, and I loved learning more about Goldman from a different point of view, through a magical lens. Also, since it’s rare that “older” women (middle-aged and up) get to be the main characters in stories, this story gets brownie points for featuring an “older” Emma.
And, of course, while on the theme of worker's rights... “Burning Girls”, which won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Short Story in 2013, closes out the collection in style. Here, too, the story is thick with Jewish folklore and mysticism, explores Jewish persecution, pogroms and immigration, and I was completely transported by it. Its complex and cursed characters became very tangible for me, and at the end of the story, I wanted to reach through the pages and hold these women’s hands through everything befell them, much the same as I felt with the main characters of “Phosphorous” and “Among the Thorns”.

Now, I have to give special recognition to the stories that broke me the most: “Rats” and “The Revenant”.
“Rats” is a brilliant retelling of the doomed life of, and romance between, Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious. That’s not all it is, though. It’s also a meticulous and harsh examination of how we as a society tend to romanticize destructive relationships, mental illness, self-harm and substance abuse, to the point where we, over 40 years later, wear the faces of those who died too young on our t-shirts. Sid and Nancy were just children of parents who lost them way too soon, but in death, they have become icons, their fate portrayed as somehow darkly romantic by profit-driven companies who commodify their tragic deaths. Neither of them got the help they needed in life, and the saddest part is of course that thousands upon thousands of Sids and Nancys are out there right now, suffering, hurting themselves or others and receiving no help. Of course, their eventual tragic ends won’t be commodified, but they won’t be any less tragic for happening outside of the public eye.

So, finally, “The Revenant”. I don’t know where to begin with this story. It tore me in half, but it stitched me together again at the end, because this is a revenge story that left me feeling somewhat personally vindicated.
It is, tragically, a tale as old as time: a young girl, naive to the ways of the world, is taken advantage of by an older man. The young girl is cast aside, broken, having lost her innocence, having to live with her trauma for the rest of her life. The older man moves on basically the second he walks away from her, going home to his family, because in the end, she was nothing but warm meat to a predator like him. We know this story. Perhaps we’ve lived it.
But here is where the magical element shakes things up. The broken girl, now a damaged but outwardly functioning grown woman, resurrects a revenant – the ghost of the girl she was, the girl who died a long time ago in the older man’s embrace – and this revenant emerges with a terrifying and bloody purpose.
Listen. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve fantasized about what I would do to my own predators, my aggressors, my rapists? Maybe you do, if you’ve ever lived through an assault. Then you will truly understand how gratifying it is to read someone else’s revenge fantasy, seeing it play out, basking in the glory of it all. And this dreamed up, horrible violence, blood for blood, might not heal the trauma. Maybe nothing ever will. But there is something in me, too, an ugly and twisted but justified shadow self which cannot help but rejoice at revenge as sweet as this… leaving them violated, broken and traumatized in return. And this story touched that part of me, deeply.

This collection stands out to me, because while I’ve read similarly feminist tales, none of them have had the strong focus on Jewish history and folklore that I found here. That sets it apart for me, and having read it, I’m more excited than ever to learn more about my heritage and my roots. That’s a huge plus. And I’m equally as excited to read whatever Schanoes writes next.

Huge thanks to the publisher, Macmillan-Tor/Forge, for letting me read this in exchange for an honest review!

Wow. What a collection of stories! I absolutely loved this book. The narrative voices within each story were brilliant & the stories themselves all blended fantasy & reality, past & present, in such brilliant ways. I found every piece to be engaging and strange and intriguing all at once. Veronica Schanoes has managed to wrap pain, loss, power and femininity all together into a set of stories that left me absolutely moved by what I'd read. The way she also wove Jewish identity and pain into so many of these stories was so beautiful and so incredibly important to me. It's hard to choose a favorite out of all of the stories, but one that especially resonated me has to be "Among the Thorns". It was heartbreaking but the thread of revenge it carried was incredible and powerful and I want so many more stories like it. This is definitely a powerful book of stories and an ode to imagination and storytelling in itself and I highly recommend.

After receiving a copy of this book, and being assigned by my editor, I reviewed this book on behalf of Booklist.

Burning Girls and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction, vignettes, and thought experiments by Veronica Schanoes. Due out 2nd March 2021 from Macmillan on their Tor / Forge imprint, it's 336 pages and will be available in hardcover and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

One reason I prefer collections and anthologies is that short fiction is really challenging. It's spare and the author doesn't have a wealth of wordage to develop characters or the plotting. Well written short fiction is a delight. I also love collections because if one story doesn't really grab me, there's another story just a few pages away.

The author has an interesting and unflinching voice in many of these stories. There's a strongly folkloric quality (in the old-world bloody and sometimes brutal way that folklore had before it was sanitized by the Brothers Grimm and Mother Goose). Some were very strange, or uncomfortable to read, and several were very very good. The standouts for me personally were the titular Burning Girls, Phosphorous, and Rats (an homage to two departed cultural icons - no spoilers).

This is a very well written but uncomfortable read. There's very little smiley cuddly happiness here.

Four strong stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

A genre crossing collection of short stories, some historical, some fantastical, some both. The first story is by for the most compelling.

<i>Burning Girls and Other Stories </i> is like a silk-lined dagger, packed with stories as strange and captivating as they are brutal. It twists together familiar fairy tales with jewish folklore, feminism, and tales of belabored women both past and present.

I struggled with rating this one, because while I thoroughly enjoyed the first and last stories (<i> Among the Thorns </i> and <i> Burning Girls </i> I wasn't really captivated by the stories in between (excepting the darkly profound <i> Phosphorous). Especially the shorter stories felt confusing and often lacked direction, thought I have to admit that it might have been a result of the author embarking on some more experimental writings styles that strained the boundaries of my focus.

This collection will appeal to lovers of dark fanstay and meaningful themes, but it was a bit too heavy and disorienting for my personal tastes.