Short stories are such a unique craft that I’ve only really begun to develop a taste for, despite reading many collections of them. Some things that resonate with me as a reader: quick, nuanced development of characters and setting, a plot that feels both complete within and not restrained by the short word count, a memorable “hook” or elevator pitch, and imagery that lingers long after the story is finished.

In all those aspects, this collection handily succeeds.

The writer has clearly worked to hone her craft and each story is polished in a way that reflects that. I will say, they are considerably darker than I expected based on the blurb and description and they deal with some extremely challenging topics — but that difficult subject matter is handled artfully and couched within various forms of magical realism and straight up magic. I do hope the final copy includes content warnings, however.

All in all, I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking for a dark and somewhat magical look at death, grief, and the worlds they contain.

Thank you to the author and publisher for access to this digital ARC in exchange for my review.

Nice selection of sea stories. I love books and stories involving the sea, islands, lighthouses, etc. This book I enjoyed thoroughly.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC of this short story collection.

I ended up DNFing it at around 50%, having read the first half of the book along with one of the later short stories. While I am sure some readers will enjoy this book, it's not a good fit for me, and it's not what I expected based on the blurb and cover.

From the blurb, I expected the stories to read more like modern fairy tales in the style of, for example, Angela Carter or Kat Dunn. Some of the stories did show a clear fairy tale inspiration — The Princess Wants for Company, for example, hit a similar note to When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill. Others, however, had at most some faint parallels (e.g. The Undertaker's Dogs).

The tone and writing style has a distinctive American literary flavour to it. I found that it did not match the style of the blurb, with its "stories sprinkled into the soil of fairy tales, left to take root and grow wild there".

Most — but not all — of the stories I read before DNFing were historical and set in North America. There are elements of Latin American magical realism. Major themes include family, relationships, death and social class. There is LGBTQ+ rep, but again, not as much as the blurb's description of a "queer garden" led me to expect.

I think that for the right reader, this could be a very enjoyable book. Personally, I enjoyed some of the concepts the writer played with. Devils Also Believe was one of my personal favourites. However, I don't think any of the stories will stick with me for long.

The writer is clearly talented. The copy is also generally very clean, although there were several Spanish-language errors that I hope the editors will fix prior to publication. (One example was the use of dragónes instead of dragones — dragón should only have an accent mark/tilde in singular, not plural.)

I really enjoyed the writing style on this short story collection!
The stories were all really different but fit well together because of the similar style and themes.
All of the stories were sort of fantasy-fairytale-esque.

a hauntingly beautiful short story collection, The Sea Gives Up The Dead explores themes of family dynamics, love, grief and longing in historical as well as contemporary settings, with a fairytale twist in some. my personal favorite was "the princess wants for company", though i would definitely read a lot of these beautiful stories were they full length novels. will absolutely recommend this!

Short story collections are hard to rate because, as always, some stories resonated with me more than others. Across the board, though, the writing was beautiful and brought a bit of magic to each story. Grief was a recurring theme across the stories, handled each time in a really fascinating, nuanced way.

What a beautifully written book. Such sad subjects but the way they are written is magical. The words flowed from the page and so did my tears! I devoured this in one sitting. Beautiful, thank you.

As someone who normally wouldn’t pick up a short story collection, I really enjoyed this book. I think the length of each story was fitting and it didn’t feel like something was missing from each tale, which was my main issue with previous collections I've read.

As the title suggests, most of the stories deal with death as a main theme in very different and interesting ways. Not all stories were great, but I did like most of them (especially the last one). This book was quite a surprise for me and I was pleased by the experience.

Many thanks to Red Hen Press and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This review and many others can be viewed on my Goodreads page at the following link: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/80102102-ana