It’s the oldest story in the world. Some dumb kid always wants to put it to the test. “It” could be any number of things. Jumping when the d-mat process starts to see if it makes you taller. Spinning in a circle anticlockwise in the hope of being switched from left to right. Squeezing thirteen people in at once just in case the one with the guiltiest secret disappears.Often when I am auditing my library against the list of books I know I have acquired in a previous year, I find some of them have gone missing. This is a different case - I realised that I had contributed to the Kickstarter for the book's publication in 2014, and never got around to downloading it! Anyway, that was easy enough to remedy once I realised my mistake.
I thought this was a tremendously strong anthology, and my money was well spent. One of the stories, Amal El-Mohtar's “The Truth About Owls”, went on to win the Locus Award, and several others were shortlisted elsewhere or included in various Year's Best volumes. All of them were good and some of them were really stick-in-the-mind good; to pick just two, Jim Hines' tale of the Chupacabra, and John Chu's about the time-travelling skater. The stories are all written with diversity as an axiom, ie none of them is about cishet white men (like me); but the point is the story in each case, and the strength of the narrative, which is considerable. Strongly recommended for those of you with YA readers, or indeed who just like stories. You can get it here.
This was the most popular unread book acquired in 2014 (for certain values of "acquire") on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, ed. Alex Dally MacFarlane.
