Review copy provided by the publisher.
This collection featured stories I’d read–and very much liked–before as well as stories that were new to me. I read extensively in short SFF, so that’s not unexpected for any collection these days. What’s less typical is how consistently high-quality these stories are, across different tone and topic.
There is a rootedness to these stories that I love to see in short speculative fiction, a sense of place and culture. It doesn’t hurt that Campbell’s sense of place and culture is a northern one–not one of my parts of the north but north all the same. And forest, oh, this is a very arboreal book. There’s death and transformation here–these stories are like an examination of the forest ecosystem from nurse log to blossom, on a metaphorical level. I’m so glad this is here so that these stories are preserved in one place.