Review: Never too Old to Save the World

As I normally do for anthologies, here is a series of mini reviews for each of the short stories:

Lean In: The Lord of Hell is Coming (Ericka Kahler): I don’t want to give anything away about this delightful story. I will say that it does an amazing job of flipping many tropes on their head and, in a funny way, actually made me rethink the premises behind many of those tropes.

Big Mamma Saves the World (Maurice Broaddus): This short story has one thing I have always found annoying whenever I’ve come across it - writing spoken language phonetically to denote an accent. I don’t care if it’s supposed to be Irish or low class or whatever, it makes understanding things a lot more annoying than it has to be. Other than that, I found it to be a very fun story with a surprising twist.

A Legacy of Ghosts (Sarah Hans): What do you do when ghosts are haunting you? What if it also involves family trauma? Good, enjoyable story.

The M.A.M.I. Incident (Guadalupe Garcia McCall): This was very much not the story I expected, it read like a horror story and I was transfixed the entire time. Highly recommended read.

Adya and the Messengers (Jaymie Wagner): So far this is my favorite story of the collection. It has a fairy tale quality to it and I love both the narration and the way the story concludes. If you read nothing else from this collection, read this one.

Soccer Mom Saves the World (Addie J King): As funny and quirky as you would expect from the title. However, the ending had a little more emotion than I expected - in a good way!

My Roots Run Deep (John F Allen): The content warning at the beginning of the story is warranted, but also, it thankfully wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be given that warning. It’s the kind of story I wish would happen over and over across America - the ending of it, that is, not the part the characters had to go through.

It’s My Nature (JD Blackrose): A short mystery about folks who are disappearing on a nature trail.

Truthteller (Linda Robertson): Taking place in the 1800s American frontier the story has the characteristics of a tall tale or similar story. Even though it seemed to end far too quickly, it kept me engaged the entire time. I loved the ending.

Utopia (Vaseem Khan): The setup of this story is extremely common among science fiction stories. I was almost certain I knew where it was headed, given the amount of times I’ve come up against this trope. But the end was a shock that I only guessed about a page before it happened. Very, very incredible story.

Jackalope Wives (Ursula Vernon): That was a great story! Then again Ursula Vernon, who often writes as T. Kingfisher, knows her way around a good fable. Highly recommend.

Granny (RJ Sullivan): The author kept me guessing on where the story was going. I kept going back and forth on my guesses, based on tropes, but there’s no way I could have predicted this.

Launch Day Milkshakes (Jim C Hines): There is so much to love about this story. I think it’s one of the shorter ones in the anthology, but it packs so much in those few pages: Age, class, race, gender, and the tech oligarchy. And a PERFECT ending.

The Sunspear (Alexandra Pitchford): hilarious short story. Based on the title there is more in this world and I would love to read it.

Once a Queen (Alana Joli Abbott): Ever since reading Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, I’ve viewed portal fantasies very differently. Abbott takes the usual formula and does some very interesting work within the short story format as well as making it fit so well with the theme of the anthology. While it’s perfect like this, it does leave me wanting more.

By the Works of Her Hands (LaShawn M Wanak): A very interesting choice to place 2 portal stories back to back in the anthology. But I think the contrast works amazingly by the time the reader has read both of these. They are both featuring older women protagonists, but this story centers an African American woman. While the opening made me laugh as the author put the premise out there, front and center, to make sure no reader could miss it, the story made me think as well. I’ve mentioned this in various blog posts and book reviews, but growing up in America during my childhood we mostly had white male protagonists. (When I look at kids’ books nowadays at the very least we have many more female protagonists, ethnicity aside) This is key to the ending of this short story, but it colors what you think when you think of a portal fantasy. (in the same way that the old “I can’t operate on my son” riddle works; or AI models only producing white doctors if asked to generate a photo) It wasn’t until I was an adult and began to expand my horizons (one of the GOOD aspects of the internet) and realize that what I took for granted was harder on the women or the LGBT folks or people of other ethnicities who never saw themselves in the stories. (Which is why I get so annoyed/angry at folks who are mad at WotC for having images in the D&D 5.5e of player character species that have different skin colors and hair types) This is getting to the point where I may be making this story sound anvilicious. It isn’t. It’s a fun and funny story that is ALSO a remedy to the typical portal fantasy narrative.

All the World’s Treasures (Kimberly Pauley): Aliens, eldritch horrors, the trope that there’s something more going on with that shop in Chinatown, inter-generational love/conflict/misunderstanding, and immigrant stories - that’s a lot to mix into one short story! And yet it works so well here! Sure, I spoiled a bit there, but it’s such a delight to read that it won’t matter. Read it and enjoy yourself! I think you’ll find a lot to like here, especially if you have Asian ancestry.

Strange Wings (Kathryn Ivey): This has lots of things within that would definitely merit content warnings. It also does a good job deconstructing and reconstructing the “chosen one” narrative for a modern, more realistic world. It has a decent ending on its own, but it also seems like it’s the prologue to a novella or novel. I would certainly like to see where it goes.

The Mountain Witch (Kathryn Ivey): As the story progressed I had more and more of an inkling of the direction in which it was headed, but Ivey did such a great job providing nice little details that I didn’t foresee. Additionally, the characters were fun to read. Yet another short story is perfect on its own, but which leaves me wanting more. (Kinda like the character at the end ;o) )

The review is also on Goodreads and Storygraph