Thank you to NetGalley and RDS publishing for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are my own and subjective.

3.5. It's nice to read about folklore and mythos that I don't know much of. That does mean that I have trouble pinning down the exact being that's referenced in each story, other than the spelled out ones like the Baba Yaga.

There are 13 stories in this collection, and like all collections, my enjoyment varied. The author explored the queer experiences of being a outcast, and how each protagonist finds their salvation in the weird and supernatural. They definitely understood how it feels to have their queerness be simultaneously too visible and completely invisible to the society as a whole. Being queer myself, this emotion is all too familiar to me, and perhaps that makes me biased!

My individual ratings for each story are as such: Nine Tongues Tell Of - 3/5 The Town the Forest Ate - 3/5 When Raspberries Bloom in August - 4/5 The Mall on the Hill by the Horizon - 4/5 Convalescence - 3.5/5 The Drowning Line - 4/5 Swallow - 4.5/5 Holding Hands with Monsters - 4.5/5 The Midnight Feast - 1/5 The Language of Knives - 5/5 Bones Are Stones for Building - 5/5 Spring Is Violence, Spring Seeks Blood - 4/5 Baba Yaga Helps Build a House - 1/5

The stories that I had high ratings on are the one that really dive into the queer themes, while the one with a 1 are... not to my taste. They feel thematically different from what I've come to expect from the collection, and I suppose I just didn't appreciate the whiplash.

This is overall a very strong collection, but I'll also point out that the theme does repeat itself a lot, and if I weren't the exact target audience of it, might come off as 'author only knows how to write One Thing'. I can tell that it's something the author feels very deeply for, and I appreciate it and am curious to see where they go from here.