it is very clear this press did not have an illustrator for this collection and for multiple reasons they should have just stuck with no “illustrations” at all. i will actually never recover from clipart empanada man

also had a sinking feeling and looked it up and the editor of the collection (who also put together the… illustrative elements, shall we say) is in fact a white woman. which explains why someone was compelled to insert footnotes for 1) translating “hola, amigo,” and 2) explaining the taj mahal. also why no care was put into making the “illustrations” match the contents of the store, aka why the sleeping beauty retelling has a dark haired princess but the image is blonde, and why the beauty and the beast retelling is set in india but the image has, you guessed it, a blonde white woman.

of the 4 stories i’ve read so far i only liked the first 2 but i also can’t help but feel like the authors were done a little dirty. i get that this was published by a small press trying to do good but it was ALSO published in 2021 when there should’ve been much more care put into it

i know it’s because the audiobook narrators are doing their own thing and there is typically very little communication of any kind between narrators but the difference between livia’s impression of sarmodel and sebastian’s is actually hilarious. im choosing to believe that to sebastian sarmodel sounds like a horrible french imp and to livia he sounds like a grand british judge and neither of the other knows

“The mascot of the biggest nuclear power provider in the country is Atomisk the elephant, a cheerful pink pachyderm who Never Forgets to Pay His Utility Bill On Time” bleak and also nyseg wishes