I laughed during each and every one of these stories. I want to meet these fairies, they are fantastic!!

The Best of Bad-Ass Faeries is a decent anthology of faerie stories, some of which I enjoyed, while others were just so-so. It's a mixed bag. The majority are well-written, entertaining stories with a few "just ok" here and there. The Ballad of The Seven Up Sprite kicks things off nicely, and my other favorite was Moonshine. There are more hits than misses, which makes for an enjoyable collection overall. I would recommend this to fans of faerie tales and mythology short stories.

The Best of Bad-Ass Faeries is a collection of short stories showing that Faeries aren't all gossamer and dandelions - some are downright badass! The collection spans different genres from western to space opera to mystery and everything in between, all with bad-ass, kick-ass Faeries.

I hadn't read any of these stories before, so they were a refreshing change from anything I have read previously. Thoroughly enjoyable!

~Many thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review~

What a fun concept! And several very enjoyable stories. Just as in any collection, some will appeal to different and varied audiences which is part of the appeal. I quite enjoyed it and am happy to have had the opportunity to read it.

I really like the concept of this book and I was so excited to get a copy through Net-Galley to read. I found the book started off really strong with The Ballad of The Seven Up Sprite, but I didn't really enjoy the subsequent stories.

The Best of Bad-Ass Faeries is a well curated collection from the Bad-Ass Faeries series, curated and edited by Danielle Ackley-McPhail. Released in 2017, it's 326 pages and is available in paperback and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. 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 authors don't have a wealth of wordage to develop characters or 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. This is a varied bunch of well written faerie-fiction. It's unapologetically gritty and Tinkerbell's nowhere to be found. The stories (as with all anthologies) are a mixed bunch. There are westerns, mysteries, time travel, and always always badass faeries doing faerie stuff. I sincerely enjoyed this collection and a couple of the stories surprised a chuckle out of me and at the end of the day, that's worth the price of admission.

There are 20 stories here by my count: 5 from each previously released anthology, and they're all quite entertaining. A couple of them are sublime. I intend to acquire some of the new-to-me authors' longer fiction for comparison.

Four stars. It's a solid collection.

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

Thank you Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Netgalley and Paper Phoenix Press for this free copy in exchange for a review.

None of these stories were particularly good. Some were ok. Most were boring. Some were quite bad.