This was a really neat collection. Each short story is followed by an explanation of the myth or legend that inspired it. Some authors retell a story but in a different time and place (“The Land of the Morning Calm” by E.C. Myers, which injects Korean ghosts into an MMORPG), while others latch onto a tiny detail and expand it (“Spear Carrier” by Rahul Kanakia, which imagines an entire life for a battlefield redshirt). I don’t know a lot of the stories in Asian mythologies, and really enjoyed reading both the stories and the background segments that explained the original myths.
Tag: editor-elsie chapman
Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food and Love, ed. Elsie Chapman and Caroline Tung Richmond
The connection between these short stories is that they all take place on Hungry Hearts Row, a neighborhood of restaurants featuring very different cuisines and very different stories. There’s some interplay between characters but only enough to unify the scene. Only a couple of the stories take the prompt literally and use food to bring characters together romantically; others were about relating to estranged family through food, or using food as a way to make peace with one’s past. I particularly liked the ones that were more out of left field, like the one where the Chinese restaurant was actually an integral part of a gang war, or the one where the Muslim superhero literally fell out of the sky in front of a food cart. Some duds, but a strong collection overall; I appreciated the wide variety of ethnicities and cultures represented in both the foods and the stories.