***This review is scheduled to go public on 11/15. I will update this review with the links when they are live.

Pick Your Potion is a collection of 26 genre-blending stories that mix fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, all with a focus on female and queer characters. The tales feature everything from a magical board game to a time-loop demon apocalypse, offering a unique blend of magic, mystery, and macabre intrigue.

This was great. There are lot of really fun stories in here. I loved CurioQueens [about a magical game board], Overnight A Forest Grew [about …. pretty much exactly what it sounds like it’s about], The White Factory is a really cool spin on a Hunger Games-type situation (minus the dying). Even the stories I didn’t love love I still enjoyed reading.

I don’t read a lot of short story compilations but this was well written and almost all of the stories start off with a bang and I was immediately hooked.

I mean, look at this:

“One day in late spring, 108 women named Nicole gather outside a large white building that was once a factory.” [The White Factory]

Or this one?!?!?

“When I wake from having my breasts surgically removed, multiple apocalypses are in progress.” [Light and Sleek and Strong]

Really, this is an incredible compilation of stories and I enjoyed this so much.

Thanks to NetGalley and Foxgrove Press for a copy of this ebook. This review is honest and my own.

It took some time until I got into the stories. Because i needed some time to let my self enter the plots.

About around 30% in, I really enjoyed most of the stories, my favourite being This Is (Not) My Beautiful Cat.

If you are a fan of short stories, definitely pick it up

There's something for everyone in this short story collection, especially if you're looking to read more sapphic fiction. It's refreshing to see queer fiction weaved in so flawlessly and without drawing too much attention to it, which this collection does so well. I particularly enjoyed the story about rebirth at the age of ten.

It was an absolutely delightful anthology to read. Various representation of people and creatures of different backgrounds, each with unique stories that hit differently depending on what you're in the mood for. From the get-go, it was neat to see the beverage choices that each author thought reflected their work, hence the book's title. Some of them sounded pretty tasty! Some stories in this collection are longer than others. Most stories I enjoyed. Quite a few I desperately would have loved a TV or film adaptation. I think my favorite was the board game story that is purely based on luck, good or bad fortune may fall upon you if played. The other one I enjoyed is where Earth is dying and the group of hopeful people who live on a ship are able to go between alternative dimensions of Earth (?) as they try to find a new home and survive both native and foreign threats along the way. Now that book would be a fun sci fi film. This anthology encouraged me to look for more like it and check out other works by the authors whose stories I loved. Definitely would recommend this to my friends to read. Good job on putting this collection together. I hope you guys can do it again!

DNF at 22%. I read 5 stories.

To be honest, I should have DNF’ed after the first story. The book is labelled as LGBTQ on Netgalley. However, the first story (Curioqueens) felt transphobic and non-binary exclusionary. The main character described another character at some point in the story as ‘the woman/man/boy/girl behind the bar’ and in the sentence after as ‘sir/ma’am’. This made me very uncomfortable because the author could have literally written ‘the person behind the bar’. Why the emphasis on either man or woman. It’s an LGBTQ book and non-binary people are completely left out.

The story called ‘All Times I’m Ten’ also left a weird taste. It's about someone first born as a boy, when he was a young man he died and reborn as a girl. This story talks again only about girls and boys and in very traditional gender roles. Some quotes: ‘The girl who could speak to angels and the boy who pulled the enchanted sword from amber’. ‘The girl was a seamstress’, ‘The boy was the general who drove monsters underground’. It was all incredibly binary and stereotyped.

The first story had potential, but when a story disregards trans/non-binary people like that I am done. The other stories I read felt very unfinished. They ended suddenly and didn’t really have a point.

Thank you Netgalley and Foxgrove Press for giving me the possibility to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

When I saw the teaser for Pick Your PotionI was pretty excited and I wasn't disappointed!

The introduction to the collection is captivating and sets the perfect mood for what follows. We enter a bar and the menu includes drinks as well as brief highlights of each story. As a cw, and in general, I thought this idea and overview was fantastic.

The collection as such read like a little adventure to me and felt a bit like a sketchbook. Some of the stories were more raw, others more polished, but overall I found them all exciting and wanted to stay with them longer than their length allowed.

Ephiny Gale plays with a lot of cool ideas. The magicians who get new hands to master their craft, the neuro that allows you to dive into an emotional level of others that makes language obsolete, the girl who wears candles on her head so the world doesn't end, the most powerful witch in Witchville who has to pay a high price for her mercy, or the cat that jumps between worlds...

There are a few stories that really touched me. These include 'The Magic in Our Hands', 'The Candle Queen', 'Smol Animaux' and 'The Most Powerful Witch in Witchville'. Neuro' was also very captivating and is the story I would have liked to spend more time with, simply because the abyss of this technology has so many potholes in store. The story was good, but a little too shallow and sweet for my liking. Overall, though, I was impressed by the presentation and the variety of all the stories. It definitely doesn't get boring!

I think this collection of short stories is a balanced mix of serious, tragic, funny and queer, and I loved the visuals (the pictures for some of the chapters are wonderful!). Hats off to the illustrator Margot Jenner!) and the storytelling was a lot of fun!

Thank you to Foxgrove Press and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Review´s up on goodreads, amazon and will be posted on my IG 18.10.24

Pick Your Potion is a wonderful collection of short stories. And, they come with drink recommendations! This collection showcases a great variety of Gale's work, from an interdimensional cruise ship (told as a set of TV episode recaps) to a time-loop demon apocalypse to several stories of magic and technology being used badly. I loved it. The quality of writing was only outmatched by the sheer creativity of the stories.

Read from September 3rd, 2024 to September 9th, 2024. Written on September 24th, 2024.

I do have to apologise for the delay but work has been tough and I barely have time to breathe.

Now, I did enjoy this book, its illustrations, stories, insane storylines and crazy plots. I loved it. Some were better than others, but that always happens. In general, it was a great book to spend the time and I am definitely going to give a try to the drinks in the menu (ifkyk). Also, reading the idea behind each story was so cool, it really creates a connection between the author and the reader.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this before it came out, just wish I had devoured it BEFORE it came out.

Signing off,
B.

(Free ARC from NetGalley and Foxgrove Press that I chose to review after reading - Cross-posted on Goodreads on September 24th, 2024)

This book was a huge short story collection of lots of genres, including fantasy and horror. The stories really were a perfect length to be picking up and reading throughout the day and in short spaces of time I have available to read. The writing was really easy to read and kept my interest up.

This is a wonderful collection of stories, ranging from sweet and magical to downright horrific and spooky. A few that still stick with me include The Candle Queen, Overnight a Forest Grew, and The Orchard. I took my time with this book, savoring just one or two stories per sitting. They’re incredibly creative, and the writing is consistently strong throughout. If you enjoy the short story format and love the intersections of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, you’ll definitely find something to enjoy here.

I picked up Pick Your Potion because a collection of spooky, witchy, queer short stories sounded right up my alley. I was so excited to jump into this but despite a handful of stand out stories, the collection as a whole didn't deliver.

I love short story collections despite their common pitfalls and am very comfortable with short stories that don't resolve themselves cleanly or that require more attention from the reader to understand. My struggle with some of the stories in this collection was that they didn't give me enough to feel like they had a point. They felt unfinished in a way that was very unsatisfying as a reader. Some of these might have worked as slightly longer short stories or novellas, whereas others felt like they really needed a full novel to properly explore what was being presented.

Others, like La Vie En Mer, were absolute gold (I loved the way this one felt like it could be in conversation with Carmen Marie Machado's SVU-themed short story of similar structure). Faewild was another favorite (this one felt a bit like The Magicians by Lev Grossman - might be something to interrogate that my favorite stories tended to feel like they were in conversation with something else). This is (Not) My Beautiful Cat was simple yet heart-warming - as a cat-owner, it made me want to give my cats an extra kiss.

I'm glad I picked this up because I did find some stories I really enjoyed in here and, ultimately, it was a quick read. However, I would struggle to recommend it to anyone because I don't think the number of stories I really enjoyed outweighs the ones I was frustrated or disappointed by.

Thank you to Foxgrove Press and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A short story collection featuring mostly SFF stories, including horror, magical realism, epic fantasy, speculative fiction and weird fiction, the stories here vary not just in genre, but also in lenght (the shortest one is 200 words I think).
I really enjoyed the introduction which is presented as a little menu that introduces each short story. Even if it lead to a lot of flipping around in my ebook copy I wanted to always reread the little menu entries before reading the short stories. It made them more interesting to me. (If you dislike spoilers skip the introduction in this case, the author has included a warning though). I also enjoyed that the author included trigger warnings at the end of the book.
My favorite stories in here where All the Times I'm Ten, a short story about a chosen one that keeps being reborn and has to save the world over and over again, La Vie En Mer, a story told in the summaries of a sci fi show about a universe jumping cruise ship, Rewind, a story told from the end forward and reveals a really messed up world in the process and Smol Animaux, a short story set during covid about finding companionship in little nanobot created animals.
Unfortunately I did not enjoy all the stories and many of them felt like unfinished ideas for longer stories, ending often just when the story became interesting. I also found some of the twists came a bit unexpected and I think if the stories had been extended a bit in the beginning, they could have worked better for me.
All in all however, I am still glad I picked up this short story collection, particularly since the author's writing style is interesting and the ideas are also quite intruiging and if you enjoy SFF short stories I would advise you to check it out, if only because I really enjoyed the four stories that I found to be my favorites.
Below you can find a short listing of all short stories, a short description, my thoughts and opinions, as well as content warnings specific to each story:

CurioQueens: A cardgame which can have deadly consequences, follows a girl, then woman, throughout her life after she plays it the first time with her parents, very interesting and fun, tw: death, amputation
Restoration: A very short story (apparently 200 words according to the intro) about a couple trying to survive in a futuristic world, tw: illness
The Magic in Our Hands: A story where some people have magic and some can even pick which magic they want by changing the skin on their hands through specially grown skin gloves, interesting and really not as gorey as I imagined it, but fun tw: body horror, suicidal references
*FAV* All the Times I'm Ten: A story following a chosen one, who keeps being reborn. Heartbreaking, but very interesting. tw: child soldier
Nowhere, Australia: A little short story about a group of people lost in Australia, unable to remember most things and losing memories again as time passes, very nice creeping dread tw: sexual assault, bullying
The Candle Queen: A young woman raised and trained to hold up a crown of candles, which are never supposed to go out or the world ends and the girl that wants to free her, interesting and sweet, tw: (technically consensual, but there is a lot of outside pressure) imprisonment
Solace: A mishap with a needle leaves a seamstress stuck in the home of the woman she was sewing clothes for, but maybe it's not that bad, interesting sci fi concept, but I would have loved some more exploration of it, tw: genetic warfare, infectious disease, vomiting
Last Text: A woman who receives people's last texts and the woman who falls for her, heartbreaking, but very short. tw: allergy death, suicidal references (the character takes actions to quicken their death when they would have died anyway, but a trigger warning still feels right)
*FAV* La Vie En Mer: A story told in summaries of a sci fi tv series about a luxury cruise ship that manages to travel through various universes, interesting and I liked the characters, it felt very star trek but on the ocean, which was a bonus tw: amputation, cancer, domestic violence
*FAV* Rewind: A story that starts at the end, where a ghost hunter meets a ghost and then rewinds in time to show what happened before revealing a really messed up death-obsessed world, quite interesting, tw: forced marriage, murder, suicide
Overnight, a Forest Grew: As the title suggests a forest grows overnight and the main character, who works as assistant to a guy who makes perfume that makes you smell like famous people, has to deal with the fallout. Interesting, but I would have liked some more exploration of the characters (like why is our main character turned more and more masculine by the perfume guy? Forcemasc swag?) tw: death
Watchhouse: A world were a very rich family locks up their daughter in a house for being queer and then brings two other queer girls (from less rich family's but not poor) and if they could be seen from the other house an AI shoots them to kill the queer? I don't quite understand that short story, it is too short to really pull off that level of convoluted world building, tw: homophobia, murder, imprisonment, kidnapping, suicide implication
Light and Sleek and Strong: After a person's top surgery (not sure if trans or just wanted the H cups removed, it's not really discussed) suddenly apocalypses start, they start to suspect is has to do with them. Okay, but a bit confusing. tw: apocalyptic events, mass death, unsanitary, suicidal references
Faewild: A pokemon/dnd crossover where creatures from the Faewild can pass over to the human world and tend to end up captured by humans and after some schooling also faught with, interesting and one of the longer stories, but one I think could have been more interesting if it was even longer, still fun, tw: bullying, animal abuse/injury to animal, amputation
The White Factory: A short competition for Nicoles where they need to find keys. Fine, but it wasn't that interesting and I had hoped for something interested in the end, instead of a Bachelorette ending.
Neuro: A world in which people can record themselves and their experiences/dreams and then other people can experience the recordings as if they were there themselves. For the most part pretty standard "new tech and what it does", but I enjoyed the part where doctors can use it to understand their patient's pain if they are unable to perform it "right" or express it in a way the doctor understands (if they f.e. have chronic pain or autism, both if which can skew how you express your experience of pain).
When the Ice Comes In: During a prolonged cold snap in Australia, the protagonist finds some matches and a tiny woman appear when she lights one. Okay, but I didn't really feel the desperation got across enough to explain the ending. tw: suicide, fire
*FAV* Smol Animaux: An expecting mother finds a way to deal with the isolation during covid lockdowns thanks to a neighbor giving her small animal companions made lifelike through nanobots. Horrifying ending, interesting, messy. tw: child death
The Most Powerful Witch in Witchville: A small town of witches isolated from the outside competing for who's the most powerful witch, it's okay? Interesting concept, but I feel like the tension was a bit sucked out of it for being such a short story. I feel this one might have worked better as a full novel.
This Is (Not) My Beautiful Cat: A sweet story about a time-travelling cat returning to the same person, it's cute
Lovely Lilas: A woman has her personality copied for companion-androids. Interesting, but very short.
The Orchard: A competition to inherit a magic orchard. I liked the romance aspect, but I wish it had explored the child characters in more depth. tw: loss of body part
Inheritance: A very short story about inheriting the memories of your ancestors, interesting concept
Marina, Hel and Cady Save the Universe: After a birthday party portals to different worlds start popping up and three kids explore them, it is interesting and I liked the twist of why they weren't affected at the end, but the way they solved it was again rather bland? tw: amputation, suicide
As Long as We Both Shall Live and After, Too: A short story about a dead wife being reincarnated as a clone baby, while the other wife keeps her body intact through becoming an android, interesting, albeit a bit creepy as well, but I wish it had continued on instead of stopping just when the story got interesting, as that could have explored the weirdness of the situation better
Traces of Us, Hot Enough for Dinner: On the one year anniversary of her fiancee's death, a woman is invited to another wedding. It is an unpleasant affairs as can be expected in such cases until the Demons Attack. Interesting time loop story. tw: death, amputation

dnf @ 56%

Tried to push through but at the halfway mark I had yet to read a single story that pulled me in. For the most part this suffered from anthology disease, where there was some small flashes of promise but the short length meant everything was just confusing any any small gems ended the second they showed any promise.

Some of the stories were great and others I had to skip past after reading half or so and how some of them ended so abruptly, it almost read like a half finished book, i understand it’s short stories but some of them ended way too soon. However some of the stories I’d read a full book on are;
Curioqueens
The candle queen
Last text
Watch house

This was a wonderful short story collection! The stories were fun, weird, Queer, and sweet. The collection as a whole reminded me of Emily Austin's novels but set in a fantasy world--just a bunch of weird gay girls going through it. My favorite stories in the collection were "When the Ice Comes in," "The Orchard," and "Smol Animeaux."

"When the Ice Comes in" is inspired by the Little Match Girl, which was one of my favorite fairytales as a kid. It is about a woman struggling to stay warm in a frozen world.

"The Orchard" I enjoyed for its whimsy and romance. The setting in this story was lovely.

"Smol Animeax" really scratched that horror story itch for me. It was a bit predictable, but I still couldn't get it out of my head for a long time after I read it.

I also really liked the introduction, where the table of contents is formatted as a menu with a drink and author's notes accompanying the title of each story.

Overall, I highly recommend this collection! The pacing is well done, with a good combination of shorter and longer stories. The concepts are all intriguing, and I finished the collection wanting more. Fans of queer fantasy and sci fi should especially check this collection out.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

4.5/5 stars

Thanks you to NetGalley and Ephiny Gale for an eARC of this book for review.

Love the beverages outlined to go with each story along with the little story behind the story. I wish it were structured slightly differently but thats more my own preferences than anything.

The stories themselves start out with a banger "CurioQueens" which is available for free to read on the internet if you want a taste of the stories.

I was very pleased to come across a story I've read and recommended to friends before.

Like any short story collection, some stories resonate more or better than others and your mileage may vary.

It's a lovely sized book. Good to spend an afternoon with in these upcoming fall days.

What a selection of short stories! They cover sci-fi, fantasy, dystopian, horror and LGBTQIA romance. I loved this selection. Some of the stories left me wanting more. I particularly loved how Ephiny Gale packs so much world building and detail into the short stories, it’s a fantastic talent. I like the introduction where the stories were presented as a cocktail menu with some background behind each story.

My favourites include:
Curioqueens - a story about a cursed board game.
The Candle Queen - about a queen who must not let the candles go out else the world will end.
Faewild - think Pokémon crossed with Hogwarts.
Smol Animaux - a very dark story set in lockdown.

I loved all the stories in this book, I will definitely seek out more writing by this author. I enjoyed visiting each world throughout the book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Foxgrove Press for the opportunity to review this ARC.

Overall I really loved this collection, it felt like there was such a great range storytelling throughout that really gripped me.

I loved this book! I found that the short stories were a really good length. They were easy to read when I had a little bit of time and get through it without having to stop. I honestly loved all of the stories for different reasons,, there really is a story for everyone in this book. I would definitely recommend!

ARC REVIEW 📚 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ thank you @netgalley and the publishers for this wonderful opportunity to read this magical novella. I loved every story. Although I read this in one sitting I recommend to take each little story and read one a day maybe before bed or on lunch break. I think the stories have more magic that way instead of reading in one go. Each world, plot , character I enjoyed. I loved how the author states she was inspired by board game ♟️ books/ movies like jumanji and wanted to write more like it. I honestly wish it was a whole series lol. Highly recommend. If you are in a book slump this is a perfect palate cleanser. 💖