Love Hurts

This anthology was delightfully dark! The theme is love, but not the HEA kind, although there were a few HEA's included. There wasn't a single story that I didn't enjoy but some stood out as my favorites.

Sing by Karin Tidbeck - I adored every aspect of this story, although I wanted more from the ending. I have to admit, I'm the worst at ambiguous endings :) I loved the main character and immediately connected with her, an outcast on a distant planet, with a dark secret about her village's exceptional gift.of song.

Ghul by Matt Leivers - Of all the spec fiction genres, horror is usually my least favorite, but I fell in love with this story. It is quite dark but so perfectly captures the inexplicable emotions of love, and the lengths, right or wrong, that a person can be driven to. This is m/m an I thoroughly enjoyed the sensuality that the author captured. Also a wonderful setting.

A Puzzle by the Name of L by Carla Dash - This story was amazing. The main character is visited by Death. If is funny, heart-breaking, and yet hopeful as well. This felt like a really exceptional romance read in some ways but it was so much deeper and so much more.

Sorcerer's Unattainable Garden by A. Merc Rustad - A beatifully written story of love between a sorcerer and a shadow. The writing is simply gorgeous. Almost like reading poetry. And a wonderfully touching ending as well.

This was a great collection. I really enjoyed the many ways that the authors talked about love gone wrong or right. I did think the theme of the stories tied them together well. Some were in different time periods, future and past. Some were wonderfully strange, but intriguing enough for me to look up the author's other work. There are some dark stories described that definitely creeped me out too. The love in the stories reached beyond, life, death. humans, morality and sometimes light years. The weirdness was definitely a treat that I enjoyed.

ome of my favorites of the collection are quoted and described below.

The Woman who Sang by Terry Durbin
"It doesn't matter. Love and understanding are two dishes seldom served of the same plate." In a cold ordered world, man is shown love but doesn't know what to do with it.

Iron Roses by Michal Wojcik
"Put enough love into anything and it comes alive." A boy tries his hardest to get the girl, but it doesn't end well.

Back to Where I know You by Victoria Zelvin
"What is important is not always happy. Ariadne preferred to preserve only happy memories, to help her remember that life has not always been so gray." Chemicals are used to alter memories, but Ariadne's trying to hold on to her favorite ones.

By Bargain and By Blood by Aliette de Bodard
"To leave something behind me. Something I shaped and not taken apart." A mother not quite a mother, makes a decision because she can't let go.

Catching On by Kyle Richardson
"You know what time really is, Oss? Its an endless stream of death. An infinite line of heartache and suffering." Two superheroes try to protect the world, at all costs.

While (u>i) i--; by Hugh Howey
"While you are greater than myself, reduce myself. " A strange but memorable couple, finds a way to relate in old age, despite strange differences.

Sing by Karen Tidbeck
"Someone wanted me It was a very strange sensation, like a little hook tugging at the hollow under my ribs." A woman struggling to belong on a future world where the locations of moons can control sound.

I would recommend this to sci-fi and speculative fiction lovers. There were some stories that were not as good and didn't connect with me, but they were few and far between.

My enjoyment of anthologies is heavily dependent upon how much of our tastes the editor(s) and I share. In this case, I found the anthology to be uneven and DNFed many stories.

The deBodard and Tidbeck reprints were wonderful. deBodard's Tidbeck's story, especially, appealed to me for what it had to say about disability being less about the individual and more about the society they're in.

"Back to Where I Know You" by Victoria Zelvin is a sad story of love in a dystopian society.

[I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review.]

A good collection of science fiction/fantasy stories that are are related to love. As is usual with anthologies, you will like some stories better than others - the ones I enjoyed the most were 'Back to Where I Know You' by Victoria Zelvin, 'By Bargain and By Blood' by Aliette de Bodard, and of course, 'Sing' by Karin Tidbeck, who I absolutely adore (although I had already this story on Tor.com).

Honorable mentions to ''Traveler' by Michael Milne, 'Virgin of the Sands' by Holly Phillips, 'Alice' by Morgen Knight..

Overall, this was a good collection of stories that exposed me to some new authors as well as provide good stories by some I already knew.

Like any anthology with such a diverse range of authors and stories, my enjoyment varied by story. The reason I give it five stars is that the range went from loved to liked. There wasn't a single tale that I didn't enjoy and I'd highly recommend this book to any lover of short stories and spec fiction.

Though I’m not a linguist, I love words and their wizardly talent for surviving transmogrification, as their earliest meaning clings to their roots like a bur to bristles. Consider anthology’s Greek origin: antho, meaning “a blossom” or “flower,” as in chrysanthemum (gold flower), and logy, from the verb “to gather,” as in a collection. Eventually Latinized, anthology became known as a collection of poems, and thus is how we get our use of the term, a collection of literary works that complement one another in some way. But the Greek word, a collection of flowers, speaks most readily to Love Hurts.

Yes, the works in this anthology have a common theme, but because they are works of speculative fiction, the similarities are more or less irrelevant. Speculative fiction, in my opinion, is often ripe with wordplay and filled with rich prose working to disorient the reader, making her squirm and fumble in intellectual darkness. Good speculative fiction asks its reader to rummage up meaning, rather than serves it up on a platter. Bewildered and confused are positive adjectives in this case, which is not to say that a reader is less satisfied when she finishes a story that leaves her mildly heartbroken and incapable of moving on to the next read. With an anthology such as this, the push to move forward from one narrative to the next heightens the reading experience, as we are forced to leave pieces of ourselves behind in the process. This sounds dramatic, I know, but I experienced a kind of literary mournfulness as I read this compilation, traveling through its worlds from one story to the next.

To the credit of the editor, Tricia Reeks, the ordering of the pieces makes for an excellent flow, and I would encourage the reader to abide by the arrangement. As Reeks writes in her introduction, “Individually, these stories are wonderful,” but she hopes to “have also managed to capture a bit of the magic that comes from reading them as a collection—that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” And though I agree this is the case, I finished the anthology wanting to return to certain blooms again for a second redolent pass. From the first story, A. Merc Rustad’s "The Sorcerer’s Unattainable Gardens," I knew I was in for a hauntingly rhythmic experience, a dance that made me relinquish any lead I may have desired to take. As I’ve already said, it is best to give in to the vertigo and be swept away with speculative fiction. Rustad’s narrative set the stage, pulling me into a world of forbidden love reminiscent of Hawthorne’s "Rappaccini’s Daughter" or perhaps a tale from Ovid’s "Metamorphoses." I was sold from the start.

Of course, as is often the case, some stories are stronger than others, weightier, more invested, polished by the writer’s skill set, but I can’t say that any of the twenty-six shorts left me unsatisfied. I did have some favorites, such as Victoria Zelvin’s "Back to Where I Know You," which toggles between remembrance and memory in a beautiful love story that asks what it is to recall a life we still have to live and yet have lived already. And Carla Dash’s "A Puzzle by the Name of L," which so subtly and effortlessly captures the agony of loss, the heaviness of the body as one continues to breath, to live, to resist the tsunami of grief rising to sweep one away after the death of a loved one. It is one of those stories difficult to let go of, as it refuses to let go of you. And Terry Durbin’s "The Woman Who Sang" loitered and lingered and haunted my soul long after I’d moved on and re-entered the real world. And Shannon Phillips’s "Favor" had me redefining both alien and love, and challenging my heart to stay its course as I absorbed some of the finest and most poetic lines of action I had ever read. And Morgen Knight, whose "Alice" showcases the allure of dystopian literature, has so meticulously painted a landscape of longing with her words I didn’t realize they’d sneak into my subconscious and have me seeing the world with new eyes.

But to say each writer has done this in some way is accurate, too. All of the stories in this anthology deserve a line in my review, though it’ll have to satisfy to say that in every one, whether sci-fi or dark fantasy or delving into elements of magical realism, time travel, and horror, the cicatrices of love marked their place in the collection, having stamped and woven themselves into each tale, making each floret in this posy of darkly colored blooms worthy of a pluck.

Anyone who can remember the highs and lows of being in love will have those experiences reimagined in reading this anthology. Being a sci-if fan or simply enjoying a casual escape through a short story, one will find this book a keeper for the home bookshelf. THis is one of the most recent endeavors of contemporary authors to capture emotional bonds an weave them into stories that all will enjoy.

A collection of speculative fiction focusing on the various types of love we encounter throughout our lives. The editor has selected some gems for this book.

A great selection of stories, enjoyed the variety.

A peculiar way to interpred love, is an awesome collection that can event look as an essay about How love works