Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for giving me access to the free advanced digital copy of this book.

So i was a little late to my review and i apologize. However this book was a really good short collection of stories Thank you netgalley for this ARC i like that this short story collection had lots of different genres, Horror, fantasy, sci fi.. and just overall great stories i will say a few of them were a miss for me but majority of them were good. I LOVED the witch and fae one so so much. Also i loved the listener one. I think i love vines and flower based fantasy alot tbh. The author of this novel had very good writing and descriptions in each of the stories and i liked that alot as well. Also the cover is great! Loved the dystopian aspects as well. The Queer rep as well. I feel like this novel had a story for someone to enjoy.

One of the top three anthologies I have read this year! (And I have read quite a few!)

This is a collection of short stories that tackle several hard-hitting themes such as climate change, familial conflicts, political machinations, and reproductive fairness.

The cover is gorgeous and hooked me the minute I saw it. But what attracted me even was this line in the blurb:
“Arranged in a progression from dystopian to utopian worlds, the stories chart a path from climate despair towards resilience and revolutionary optimism.”
Imagine a range of stories arranged in order of increasing optimism! How amazing is that! The question is, does the author do justice to this huge claim? The answer; to a great extent, yes.

Most of the stories contain a thread of dreariness, but the level of hope is what keeps compounding as we progress. While none of the stories are outright joyous, the latter stories still deliver a bittersweet satisfaction. None of the worlds were utopian to me; then again, I prefer dystopian to utopian fiction, so this wasn’t a problem at all.

The stories differ in length, but their impact is more or less similar. All the stories have well-created worlds, well-sketched characters and highly believable plots, the last of which is a wonder considering that this is a speculative fiction collection! Each story is quite varied in its setting and core idea, but still connected in terms of their approach. Benefit of having one author contributing all the stories in an anthology! Moreover, as the author is nonbinary, they ensure that their stories contain LGBTQIA+ characters also, with a couple of the stories even using the uncommon ze/zer and e/er pronouns. Yay to #OwnVoices!

One more thing I loved about this collection is that there is a brief content warning in the introduction, and a detailed list of triggers for each story at the end. This makes so much sense in an anthology as readers could just go through the triggers and see which stories might or might not work for them.

As always, I rated the eleven stories individually. Except for one, all the stories reached or crossed the 3.5 star mark. So only one story didn’t work for me. My top favourites in this collection were:
👉 The Propagator - 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 – Wow! This was the very first story of this collection, and it set such a high standard that the other stories fell short due to no fault of theirs. The story deals with restrictive reproductive care in a dystopian government, with the protagonist having figured out a novel way to rebel against the system.
👉 The new nomad - 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 – I think I connected a great deal with this as I am a parent too. The story provokes you into thinking about choice – what do you do when you are expecting a child but you know that the dystopian world you live in can’t afford another living being?
👉 Tadpoles - 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 – Never did I imagine tadpoles being the trigger for the mc to …. No spoilers. What a wonderful correlation!
👉 Unwhole - 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 – Oh my dear God! This was like the worst nightmare possible! This story captures the essence of what Speculative fiction should be like. I couldn’t even visualise half of what was happening and I still relished it. That ending though! 💔

4.1 stars, based on the average of my rating for each story. (Rarely do my anthology ratings even touch 4 stars. So this is an outstanding rating!)

Recommended to all those who love cli-fi, enjoy anthologies, or relish speculative fiction. This was my first Sim Kern book, and it sure won’t be the last!

My thanks to Android Press and NetGalley for the DRC of “Real Sugar is Hard to Find”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

I read Sim Kern’s Real Sugar is Hard To Find a few weeks ago, and it has stuck with me. The short story collection grapples with some heavy topics - climate change, reproductive freedom and reproductive justice (both to have, and to have not), what we owe one another, parenthood, compassion and understanding. I feel like it really captures some of the highs and lows of thinking about the future (or even just existing in the present.)

I suspect I connected with many of these stories to the level I did, because I'm a both a parent and someone concerned about the environment. Or someone thinking about the future or the world we leave behind for future generations. These stories help create potential futures, and thankfully, in many cases feature moments of repair in ruin (though not always.)

Stand outs for me were The Listener, in which we get to live in a world with at least one person that can talk to trees - but it’s also a story about family and identity. The New Nomad, where a parent confronts the unpopular idea of having another child on a struggling planet. The heartbreaking Tadpoles, where it’s about so much more than tadpoles. The Last Roads was a powerful story of change, restoration, forgiveness, and understanding. The intersection of reproductive and horticultural freedom in The Propagator. I realize now that I’ve started, there are many stories I want to call out, several weeks after reading this book - they’ve stuck around in my mind.

Worlds where the freedom to reproduce is curtailed, worlds where the freedom from reproduction is curtailed, worlds where family and community and society is restructured, worlds without cars but with accessible transportation, worlds with radical forest sprites, worlds full of imagination, there is so much richness in this work, and I'd recommend it.

Sim Kern has this ability to create worlds that feel like they exist, with relatively few words, and they’ve become an authour I follow and buy the works of. Definitely one to watch I think.

I bought this book, and also got a review copy courtesy of netgalley and the publisher.

Thank you, Android Press, for allowing me to read Real Sugar is Hard to Find early!

Another debut by author Sim Kern. Another winner in my honest opinion. This short-stories collection was impressive.

A collection of climate fiction by Kern, who is establishing themselves as a leader in this genre in work for both adults and younger readers. This is an excellent collection of stories bound to make readers think more deeply about climate change, the politics of global warming, and other issues, while still managing to have engrossing plots and characters.

I was intrigued by the cover art. This is a fantastic collection from a new to me author. Only two of the stories didn’t work for me, while written well I just felt a bit underwhelmed by them. But the rest were amazingly well done. Short bursts of good fiction. The world needs more collections like these. The title story would be great as an episode of Love and Robots.

The stories in this book were full of hard truths wrapped in well written but fairly obvious metaphors. It rarely suffered for this though - the heavy handedness is the point. I enjoyed some stories more than others, but it overall felt cohesive and bold.