Reviews and Comments

As another reviewer said a whole book of these is a bit much at once, but they're good rollicking stories about an otherwise dull pleasant English village where the Armitage family matter-of-factly deal with witches, ghosts, baby griffins that need raising, the demands of pet unicorns, and so on. They're in that unthreatening sweet spot where you have only the tiniest worry the magical problem won't get solved, and there will be something nice for tea.

This was a really likable collection if you like anthologies, with a lot of range and also a lot of dinosaurs, although Ursula K Le Guin's contribution as usual overshadowed everything else.

This was so excellently unsparing about the lives of spinsters in early Victorian England, and so intriguing about the fossil hunting, both the "science" and the business. Highly recommended.

Really funny setup, seemed to then need to have a reason to exist so there had to be a counter-revolution and then I got bored.

Kind of like a less entertaining Valley of the Dolls.

I don't know, there was lots of intriguing stuff in here but it felt labored, and I kept forgetting it was by an American writer because it seemed so much like recent Julian Barnes or whatever. Sometimes I wish writers who get older would not feel the need to deliver end of life insights, with which this novel is somewhat overburdened. I kind of love Doris Lessing for having figured out how not to get super-heavy about this--maybe because she was so serious in youth and lightened up?

Still, though, really vivid writing and sharp insights and memorable people and many writers can't do that at any point in life.