Fantasy Magazine, Issue #89, March 2023 by Arley Sorg

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Relatively quick read this month. Here are the reviews per story:

Enchanted Mirrors Are Making a Comeback. That’s Not Necessarily a Good Thing. (Mari Ness): I recognized the author’s name, but I couldn’t remember where I recognized it from. Then it hit me, Ness is the author of a series of Tor.com articles that I love in which they compared Disney movies to the original fairy tales and also wrote about production issues and other background information about those movies. So of course Ness would write a short story with this subject. I think it’s done with the appropriate amount of wit and humor to keep it from sliding into eye roll territory. I hope to see more short fiction from Ness in the future.

The Will of the God of Music (P.H. Low): a metaphor for pain and medical intervention told as someone dealing with the after-effects of asking a god to choose them as an avatar.

Moments of Doubt (Aimee Ogden): this story’s so short that I can’t really talk too much about it without spoiling it. However, I will say that it takes a well-worn story and does something new with it. The story takes a look at the trope from a point of view without morals and just looks at the human cost.

There’s magic in Bread (Effie Seiberg): Perhaps it’s a little too soon, but the present-day narrative of this story really bummed me out. The story in the past was pretty neat, even if it was also a depressing era. I kept wondering how the title was going to connect with the story and the eventual twist was really neat.The author interview confirmed what I expected – that it was semi-autobiographical.

Poetry – no review

Interviews – illuminating, as usual.




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