Fantasy Stories
Diana Wynne Jones, editor
Kingfisher
Fiction, MG Anthology/Fantasy
**
Description
A variety of fantasy stories, from silly to profound, have been gathered from variety of sources by noted fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones. Included are a few of her own works, plus passages from classic genre authors such as C.S. Lewis, E. Nesbitt, and Patricia Wrede, among others.
Review
When am I going to learn to stop buying anthologies that aren't compiled by Bruce Coville? Most of these stories are just chapters from full-length books - at least one of which is a series - and therefore seem fragmentary and pointless on their own. They range in style from silly to dark to downright convoluted, so I'm not sure just what age or intelligence level Jones (or rather the publisher) was aiming this anthology at. There were two, maybe three decent stories in here, but on the whole it was tiring to read, especially as so many of the excerpts were written in wordy, elder-day English. I admit that I didn't bother reading all the way through some of the "stories" because I grew tired of the excerpt approach. If she was going to include segments of larger works, she should've chosen stand-alone pieces, and not ones that began in the middle of the action and ended just before something else was going to happen. Are there really so few age-appropriate short fantasy stories in the world that Jones had to take fragments from larger works, or was she simply reliving her own childhood favorites by sneaking bits of them into this book? Whatever the answer, it made for tedious reading and a low rating.