Great on audio narrated by one of my favs, Cassandra Campbell, I just had a hard time really getting invested in these short stories (always a hard sell for me). Much thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to listen to an early audio copy in exchange for my honest review!

This has been my first book by author Veronica Schanoes. And I was greatly surprised by it.

I am always quite reticent about reading short stories because I normally end up with a mixture of very good and very bad stories. Totally normal, by the way.

However, this collection has been quite entertaining…

THE STORIES

In almost every single story there is a quite superb mixture of magical realism and folklore, with an added touch of Judaism, of which, I have to confess, I am a complete ignorant.

Some of them were quite truculent and obscure, but that is my kind of jam.

Among my favourites are “The Revenants” as it slightly touches a topic about which I recently read in “The Resurrectionist” (by A.R. Meyering) last year that I deeply enjoyed. I was as well captivated by the story called “Rats”.

“The Revenants” tells the story of a girl who has been used by an older man. Once he is tired of her, he abandones her. However, as she grows older, she unravels a “Revenant” (and this is the connection with Meyering’s story), the ghost of her older, more naive self. And this Revenant is thirsty for revenge.

Secondly, “Rats” retells the story of Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious, figures of the punk rock scene of the 70s. This fact, by the way, I learnt after reading the book. Their relationship was, let’s say, quite complicated, and the story rebels against the idealisation that society does of those kinds of relationships.

Among the stories I did not like are “Alice: a Fantasia”, “Serpents” or “How to Bring Someone Back from the Dead”. Totally avoidable.

The language in which Schanoes writes is full of metaphors, some of which, specially the ones having to do with Judaism, were quite obscure for me. For this reason, I ended up having to look up different terms in Internet. This was not a problem at all. On the contrary, the book had made me want to learn more about this religion.

FINAL THOUGHTS ABOUT “BURNING GIRLS”

I recommend this short story collection if you like reading magical realism. If not, don’t read it as the book is full of it. I must say is the feature I liked the most in the book.

Here you can also find quite a lot of very elegant and well written feminism, which I appreciate.
There is also some queerness, also very much welcome. But this is also a story of the devastating effects of anti-semitism that Jews have been suffering for centuries.

As I had said, the author uses a very elegant, eerie language which makes these stories a very interesting experience, which I cannot do more than recommend.
--
Thanks to the publisher, Tantor media, Inc., the author Veronica Schanoes and NetGalley for providing me with a free audiobook of “Burning Girls and Other Stories” for review purposes.

Honestly I don’t have an interest in reading this book anymore and I want to be more selective with what I request.

I didn't love all of the stories in this book but I loved a fair number of them. The last one having me tear up at the end (The one the Title comes from). My favorite was Phosphorous, a story about the Phosphorous Girls of London.

I found the references to Alice in Wonderland incredibly interesting as they would always appear when I least expected them.

There were takes on tales I've heard before, as well as tales I hadn't (or at least didn't make a direct connection from one to the other).

I would definitely recommend this, even if you're just checking it out from the library for reading on individual time I would recommend it.

It is also gay, and being gay never seems to be anything out of the ordinary. Which I LOVE.

This was 10 times better as an audiobook. it meant I was better able to visualize the places depicted.

In. CREDIBLE. A stunning collection of short stories that are very lyrically written and have serious Shirley Jackson vibes. They're beautiful and chock-full of folklore and fairy tales and legends but in a completely new way.

It's impossible to pick a favourite, but the last story in the book, the titular Burning Girls is a front-runner.

My one regret: I don't have a hard copy, yet.

The narrator is Cassandra Campbell and she's absolutely FLAWLESS.

I received a copy of this audiobook for free from NetGalley and Tantor Audio in exchange for an honest, voluntary review.

*received for free from netgalley for honest review* Really loved reading this! found it really interesting and worth the read!

A big thank-you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for giving me a copy of this book for an unbiased review.

2/5 - It was okay.

The problem with this book is that there are stories which I would absolutely rate at a five and others which I absolutely did not like. The collection is book ended by two brilliant stories - "Among the Thorns" and the title story "Burning Girls" which both deal with well-known fairy tales from a powerful, raw perspective centered around the pain and strength of a Jewish identity. These stories, along with “Phosphorus” and "The Revenant," felt like the strongest of the collection - if I had only read these four, I'd have thoroughly enjoyed the book and its creative, fresh, powerful take on traditional fairy tales.

However, many of the stories in the book were neither enjoyable to me nor accessible - and I read fairy tales and folklore constantly. There is an absurdist slant to stories like "Alice: A Fantasia" and “Lost in the Supermarket" which I found fatiguing. There may have been a point but it was thoroughly masked by indirect allusions and I struggled to even see a connection to folklore in "Lost in the Supermarket." I found many of the other stories to be rather drawn out - they did not pack the same powerful delivery as the first and last stories. What I did appreciate is that Schanoes's writing was always vulnerable, always clearly laced with a message important to the author. But I found myself growing impatient with how much work it was taking to puzzle out what it was.

Perhaps the story which disappointed me most was “Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga.” I am Russian. I grew up with stories of Baba Yaga. I could not wait to see how this story would shape out. But Baba Yaga was absent from half the story and I felt that so much more could have been done with this rich character - one who is based on ancient goddesses, who is either the most powerful evil witch in all of Russian lore or the most useful guide. This story felt like it was scraping at that surface, but never going deep enough. And it didn't help that the narrator (I was listening to the audiobook) kept pronouncing "Baba Yaga" incorrectly. It's YaGA, not YAga.

I understand why so many love this book - several of the stories are some of the best I've ever read and the concepts behind many of them are brilliant. There is careful attention to folklore tropes and details, explored through unique lenses of the author's identity and personal history. The narrator, aside from the Baba Yaga misadventure, is brilliant. But in the end I lost patience with it and I simply did not enjoy reading much of it.

DNF 30%

Unfortunately this wasn’t for me at all. I was so interested in the subject matter of these stories! The writing and the storytelling style were SO DISAPPOINTING! It was like reading something written by a robot. All the sentences’ structures almost identical. Just a procession of facts one after the other. No setting descriptions, no characterization, emotional imagery.

An absolutely fabulous collection of stories. All of them were truly enjoyable, but the standouts for me were "Phosphorous," "Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga," "Burning Girls," and "The Revenant." When half of the stories are standouts--it's got to be a damn good book. This short story collection is rife with Jewish mythology, feminism, dark fantasy, and historical retellings. Even though I had to do a lot of googling to feel like I understood some things on a base level, I had a great time. This is a collection that I feel made me smarter, which is something that made me enjoy all that more. Truly incredible.

I loved this book. The writing was beautiful and the stories strange and lovely and moving. I want to buy a copy for everyone I know and I will read these tales to my future grandchildren.

Thank you Tantor Publishing and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I don’t DNF many books, but this was one. I just couldn’t get into the audiobook narration: it didn’t pull me in and the narrator didn’t seem to fit the stories. Maybe it would have been better if I just read the book. I’ve seen many positive reviews, so there are many who enjoyed the book. Unfortunately, this just wasn’t for me.

I had tried to download this arc to listen to it about 300 times before the archive date but the netgally app would not download it no matter what I tried or how good the wifi was.. I am sorry that I cannot give actual feedback on the content of the audiobook because of this, however, I do hope that by reporting this, this issue will be rectified in the future.
I did, however, listen to the audio sample available on amazon. The book begins with a forward and the entirety of that sample is the forward. I think this is a real disservice to someone who is listening to the sample since they never get a feel for the book itself or the writers writing style.
I also read the available e-book sample which did include pages from the actual book. I found the writing style to be a bit difficult to get into. Personally, I wasn't drawn in by the writing. The flowed in a way that made it feel a bit one note, which is a strange thing to say about a story where a girl is telling how her father died. Maybe if I had access t the whole book, I would have gotten more invested. The writing does have a very interesting quality to it when it comes to painting a picture with words and vivid imagery. It is easy to picture the scene in your head as you are reading without the descriptions getting to lengthy or flowery.

As with most collections some stories were less enjoyable but overall a great collection. I look forward to more from the author.

I knew right from the introduction that this collection of stories had the potential to be something special. The combination of Jewish folklore with magical realism and real world pogroms and tyranny sounded like something, well, magical. And the author didn't disappoint.

That being said, the collection is actually quite diverse, and never feels stale or repetitive. The author mixes up styles, lengths, settings, and magical elements in a way that keeps it all feeling interesting and new. The addition of historical scenes and settings throughout was also very refreshing.

There really isn't a weak story in the collection. And they are all narrated brilliantly by Cassandra Campbell, who is no stranger to fantasy herself. The combination is brilliantly good, and not to be missed. Definitely give this one a shot!

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories. Of course, I enjoyed some more than others but overall I really this is a wonderful collection many focused on the Jewish culture. From having tea with Baba Yaga to bringing someone back from the dead. Eerie and mysterious. Creepy and brain tingling. I highly recommend it. Thanks so much #netgalley for the early review copy.

Burning Girls and Other Stories by Veronica Schanoes

Thank you to NetGalley and Tantor Audio for the audiobook Advanced Reader’s Copy, which I received for free in exchange for an honest review.

The forward, by Jane Yolen, sold me completely on this book. Now that I’ve read the book, I agree wholeheartedly, and am blown away by the haunting beauty of so many of these stories.

Our protagonists, in true fairytale fashion (but perhaps better than I’ve ever seen it) are pushed by circumstance and historical context and prejudice and sometimes cruelty, into situations where they seem to have no choices left. It’s then that the fantastical elements of the stories come in. Through magic - sometimes ugly and grotesque magic and always with a cost – our characters retain their agency and fight back, even though they rarely win a happy ending. Indeed, these stories don’t center around the concept of happy endings, or endings, or happiness. When revenge is sought and even found, it does not end in total absolution and a clean-cut ending.

At the beginning of “Rats,” Schanoes notes that all stories lie in order to wrap up cleanly, in order to have a beginning middle and end, and she plays with this truth as she writes. These stories are truer to life than a story fairly ending with, “the end,” and settle in a messier land of quiet, too-young deaths after final victories, the hope of resettling in a new place to start again after loss, the idea that even knowing the worse is coming, there will still be good on its way, and so there may be enough hope left to keep trying.

Some of these stories will stay with me for a long time, with particular quotes still ringing in my head. Some I didn’t quite understand, or read through without particularly connecting to, but that didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the collection as a whole. I’ll write individually about each story (I have listened to the audiobook twice – first just to enjoy it, and then to guide my review, remember the names of the stories, and see if I understood anything differently the second time around.)

My favorite story was “The Revenant.” (Trigger warning for grooming of and then sexual relationship/assault of a sixteen-year-old girl by a middle aged man) The quote, "Trauma is suffering that will not stay in its temporal position,” will stay with me, as well as the surrounding paragraphs and the rest of this reflective, painful story. The way this talks about messy trauma, and is written directly addressing abusive men, knowing they won’t listen or change. It ends without true healing or vindication, and therefore stays real and relatable, even if it is human nature to yearn for the fantasy of that one perfect act of revenge or truth or justice achieved, the book closed. This story sits with you in the midst of the pain from a place lighter than it is dark, more than it leads you through to a final promised land.

My second favorite was, “Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga,” which held so much, as Yolen stated in her introduction - a biography and an autobiography and a fairytale and a history and a political manifesto all wrapped into one fable. A favorite quote was, “The means do become the ends, because there is no end. There are just ongoing moments.”

“Among the Thorns,” the first story, was the exact kind of Jewish fairytale I was hoping to find in another book I read recently. I would love a second collection of stories with more of this fashion: Jewish fairytale retellings set in historical times, with antisemitism as one of the evils lurking in the woods, the divine feminine as a morally gray figure bringing the morality and powerful absence of the more traditional masculine God into question. I appreciated the queer background character in this very first story, which let me know I was welcome within these pages.

“Phosphorus” is a horror story where the fantastical, magical element is a small balm of relief set across the horror of the true historical context of capitalism, greed and cruelty and disregard of human life.

The title story, “Burning Girls,” reminds me of Beyond the Pale by Elana Dykewomon (and like it, has a queer main character). It felt both familiar and new with the ill-met grasp at agency that the Lilith demon represents for this family. This brought a new lens to stories I’ve read about so many times before – pogroms, emigration to America, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Indeed, I think a quintessential experience of book-loving-Jewish-girls is reading narrative after narrative that touches on that one fateful night at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory – however tragic it was, it feels like as much a part of my childhood as the stories of Cinderella and Snow White.

Speaking of Snow White, “Lily Glass” was a beautiful if tragic and toxic retelling of Snow White, where the young stepmother who has smothered her childhood of poverty and illness and changed her Jewish name to one more fitting for her tenuous new life as a Hollywood star, falls more for her troubled adult stepdaughter than her powerful co-star and new husband, unravelling the false self she has created and become.

The other stories all had an interesting ambience and writing style but for one reason or another didn’t make my favorites list. “Ballroom Blitz” was interesting and well-written but didn’t speak to me as much personally. It did remind me a bit of Julie and the Phantoms and Caleb’s club, which I was not expecting to be thinking about while reading this collection. “Serpents” was so fascinating but also made almost no sense to me, which might have been the intention. Or maybe it’s about adolescence and growing into a woman, a serpent? I could not tell you. I felt like I was an inch away from fully grasping “Lost in the Supermarket” and “Swimming,” which both transform the real horror of gentrification and late capitalism into exaggerated tales of living buildings our protagonists are, or are afraid of becoming, trapped in. I didn’t realize who “Rats” was about until I read other reviews, and it makes more sense to me now (and I loved its intro about fairytales repeating themselves). I did not quite understand “How To Bring Someone Back from the Dead”, or “Alice: A Fantasia,” especially the second half of the latter.

The audiobook was great. Most of the time, it felt like the exact right way to be reading the stories, and I was truly in the stories rather than noticing that someone was reading it to me. I do think this is the kind of book I’d like to have both a text and audio version of, as some stories, most especially “The Revenant,” I’d probably prefer to read as text, at least have the option to do so. I did speed up the audiobook to listen, but that is normal for me.

I am more of a library user (and Kindle deals hunter) than a book purchaser in general, but I’m definitely buying a copy of this as I know I will want to reread many of these stories over and over.

This collection of stories is poignant and relevant. They will definitely stay with me for quite some time. I enjoyed the voices of the narrators also.

Veronica Schanoes is a beautiful and talented writer that deserves all the accolades that she has received. I am still giving this book 4 stars because I can recognize the importance of these stories and all of the hard work that she as put into them to make them historically accurate and have an interesting, unique, and exciting plot.

Overall, collections of short stories are not for me, but that doesn’t take away from this book if that is something that you enjoy. Also, I recommend reading this book if short stories are not your things because I enjoyed many of the stories in here such as “Alice: a Fantasia” and “The Revenant”
Some of the short stories that really stuck out to me was Among the Thorns and Phosphorous. In Among the Thorns, Veronica focus on Jewish folklore which really isn’t very popular in my reading life so I thoroughly enjoyed her adaptation.

Thank you NetGalley for allowing me to listen to this audiobook for my honest review.

3 stars *may change
TW: self-harm, death, antisemitism
I'm a big fan of short stories-and by that I mean I like reading books under 200 pages so I can complete my reading goal quicker. This isn't technically that, but it is an anthology with multiple short stories telling of different characters going through different depressing scenarios.
I don't think it needs to be said that, obviously, some shorts are better than others. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an anthology that has a completely perfect selection of tales. That being said, I did quite enjoy some of them as well.
There was one (I'm not even going to try to name the stories because I was listening to the audiobook and I have no idea what their names are) told in the second point of view, and /man/ was that hard to listen to. It just reminded me of reading Wattpad y/n self-insert fanfiction. that's not exactly the author's fault, I just think all second POV stories are horrendous. There was another one where I can't even name a detail from it to tell it apart because I thought it was so dull. The writing in this book is lovely-captivatingly so. But sometimes it just speaks without really saying anything.
On the other hand, the stories of the 101 nights and the burning girls (cue title sequence) were the most captivating to me. I think the author's writing style really came out in them in a way that didn't show in some of the other ones.
This is a Jewish own-voices novel which, while having multiple themes throughout, always seems to be handling something dark. Antisemitism plays an important role in multiple stories and influences decisions even in the ones where it's not the main focus. Similarly, it also deals with death, self-harm, depression and mental illness, involuntary hospitalization, etc etc. I think these darker themes were handled with care and precision alongside the flow of the writing style and its poetic nature. It's not a nice story to read about by any means, but the horrificness of it truly shines along with the way its written.
I think it was a lovely audiobook and anthology, although it did reach too far at some points where I think the prose was more of decoration than actual importance. Nice either way.
Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced reader's copy.

Wonderful short stories. The story about the witch was really good and will stick with me for awhile. The fairytails we read as little girls we grow up to thing it's TRUE, so interesting take on a different culture of them. Dark but very intriguing.