Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth, Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories is a collection of acclaimed and awarded work from Amal El-Mohtar.

With confidence and style, El-Mohtar guides us through exquisitely told and sharply observed tales about life as it is, was, and could be. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose.

Full of Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Hugo Award-winning and nominated stories, Seasons of Glass and Stories includes "Seasons of Glass and Iron," "The Green Book," "Madeleine," "The Lonely Sea in the Sky," "And Their Lips Rang with the Sun," "The Truth About Owls," "A Hollow Play," "Anabasis," "To Follow the Waves," "John Hollowback and the Witch," "Florilegia, or, Some Lies About Flowers," "Pockets," and more.

My Review:

I picked this up because I’ve had mixed reactions to the author’s previous works, This Is How You Lose the Time War, co-authored with Max Gladstone, and her solo novella, The River Has Roots. Most readers LOVED Time War, but I have to confess that I did not. Howsomever, I fell hard for River, to the point that I was talking back to the marvelous audio version because I felt for the characters, wanted better for them SO MUCH, and saw the tragedy coming miles away.

This collection looked intriguing, and it certainly was that. What I didn’t expect was that it’s a retrospective of the author’s work from 2009’s “And Their Lips Rang with the Sun” to 2023’s “John Hollowback and the Witch”.

According to the author’s introduction, there is no new material in this book EXCEPT for the Introduction itself. An introduction which points out that, while these stories and poems were not collected to fit a particular theme or show a particular progression, they nevertheless display the overall themes that suffuse all of the author’s work.

In this review, I’m going to talk about the individual short stories, because that’s how I approached the collection. I listened to this in audio, and the poetry sounded beautiful, even the Arabic translations that I did not understand but sounded like spoken music. But I’m aware that I don’t really understand poetry – even in English – unless the themes hit me over the head AND I have time to really study them. Audio doesn’t lend itself to that approach.

Which leaves me to review the short stories individually, as I generally do with collections. But if you’re looking for a review of this book that approaches the collection as a whole, there’s an excellent review taking that tack in Ancillary Review of Books under the title “Scriptures in the Kindest Sense“.

Turning now to the individual stories…

“Seasons of Glass and Iron” c2016
This is a lovely mythic telling or retelling or a bit of both about two women who are both the victims of, well, the patriarchy and all of the stories that women are told that claim that everything is their fault. The princess’s voice and movement is entirely suppressed to keep the men circling her father’s kingdom from ‘stealing’ her and it’s all her fault. The woman who meets her while traveling is on a quest to wear out magical iron shoes that literally break the bones of her feet because her mother helped her see that her shapeshifting bear husband is an abusive bear regardless of what shape he might be wearing at the time. Neither of them is at fault, but society makes them think they are. It’s only when they see the monstrousness of the other’s fate that they accept that their own is unjust and that they can escape together. Escape Rating A

“The Green Book” c2010
This was a story told in its ellipses. A woman who knows too much is trapped in a book. She can only ‘speak’ if someone writes in the book. The scholar who owns the book thinks he loves her, but they’ve only met through the book and he loves ‘book-her’ more than he’d ever love ‘real-her’ and she knows it. I felt like this one needed more than it had, because it’s a lot of sad but doesn’t quite gel into a complete story. It tantalizes rather than reveals but that may have been the point. Escape Rating B

“Madeleine” c2015
This one took a while to work for me, while at the same time it felt like I’d read something similar before, (which I now think might be Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon, but this has a much happier ending). From one perspective, it’s all about the way that women are told that any behavior that deviates from the so-called ‘norm’ means they are crazy (and so does the next story, “The Lonely Sea in the Sky”, but differently). On another hand, this is a story about the processing of grief, with a side-note about the loose qualifying requirements for participating in drug trials. On a third, and likely metaphorical hand, it’s a bit of Doctor Who’s “The Silence in the Library” as the protagonists haven’t really met before they meet in dreamlike memory fragments – and yet their relationship is already intimate in a way that neither has ever experienced before because they share the same heartbreaks and griefs and just need to find their way back to each other to be whole. Escape Rating B+ I loved the ending but the middle went on just a bit long.

“The Lonely Sea in the Sky” c2014
Very SF in ways that are also very dreamlike, and again, about the medical tendency to shove non-conforming women into a box labelled “crazy”. It’s also about the way that “progress” is spun so that anyone who objects is labelled a crackpot – or mentally ill – or both. At the same time, it’s a bit of ‘first contact’ in that the alien species isn’t as little like us as ‘ugly bags of mostly water’ as it could be, and only some people are sensitive to it. And thus the story recurves back to its origin. Escape Rating B+ because a) the ending is a bit of a wow and b) the narrator’s perspective could, in fact, be crazy but it doesn’t feel that way because SF.

“And Their Lips Rang with the Sun” c2009
This story is just a bit sly. And it has layers like an onion, complete with tears. It begins with an old woman telling a tale that borders on myth and might be legend, about the way that sun-priestesses sing the sun up at dawn and down at dusk. A story being told to a young man who seems like he never intended to sit down for the tale in the first place. But as the old woman plies him with endless cups of tea and tells the story, it switches from myth and metaphor to a story of love and temptation. Then it’s a discovery that the sun needs the singing and that the moon has singers of its own. By the time we reach the end, we know the story is true and that it’s hers – and also that it’s his and that her long-lost child has finally come home. Escape Rating A and don’t be surprised if you sniffle a little bit at the end

“A Tale of Ash in Seven Birds” c2017
This story IS intentionally a metaphor. It takes seven different species of birds, from the most mundane to the most fantastical, to tell a story about the rapaciousness of empires and the tenacity of people to resist the destruction of their culture. Listening to it, it almost sounds like a poem. In the end, I found the concept more interesting than I found the prose captivating. Escape Rating B

“The Truth About Owls” c2014
First, this isn’t really about owls. It’s about one girl’s identification with one specific owl, an owl that she comes to see as an avatar for herself. The owl is named Blodeuwedd, after the woman from Welsh mythology, specifically from the Mabinogion. (And we’ll come back to that in a later story). Anisa, herself the child of a Lebanese father and a Scottish mother, living in Glasgow but self-identifying as Lebanese, is a child of two worlds, feeling out of place in both and comfortable in neither. She sees herself both in the owl, in the bird’s predatory gaze and hostility towards anyone trying to push her in a direction she does not want to go – and with the legendary figure the owl was named for, the woman made of flowers. Because Anisa sees herself as hostile and even dangerous to a world that is hostile to her, and as a person made of disparate parts that won’t combine into a whole. What she is looking for is a connection that is not freighted with expectations. Whether she achieves that by channeling a magical power she once believed she had – or by relaxing her guard against the world or by accepting things as they are is left up in the air. An interesting story that works both on the level of fantasy and as a metaphor without forcing the reader to decide which. Escape Rating A-

“Wing” c2012
Short and lovely. Most of what this story has to say seems to be in what’s not written. I think it’s about finding the person who respects your secrets and understands them the same way you do even if they don’t know the secret itself. Or something like that. And I could be totally wrong. Escape Rating B

“A Hollow Play” c2013
This was lovely, bittersweet and sad. It’s a fae-in-exile story, but it’s also about giving up dreams in order to make them come true, how much a sacrifice has to hurt in order to power magic – and what sacrifice, hurt, power and magic all mean. It’s both a story about being an immigrant or refugee and a story about being the person you’re meant to be. All wrapped up in a story about what it really means when we say that we want the person we love to be happy, and how much we’re willing to pay and to lose for that happiness when it might not include us. Escape Rating A

“Anabasis” c2017
A story on the theme of “Nevertheless, she persisted” At first, the language of transformation resonated with me, but as the story got more lyrical it also obscured its own message. It sounds beautiful as it’s read, but I just needed more time for it to invoke the images I think it meant to. In the end, it didn’t quite stick. Escape Rating C

“To Follow the Waves” c2011
If you’ve ever read The Dallergut Dream-Department Store, this is the extremely non-cozy version of that concept. The central character is a woman who crafts jewelry that makes dreams, but she works to custom order. She’s been taught to create those dreams from a combination of memory and fantasy, and they’re supposed to be dream-like all around. The magic is in giving the dreamer the desired dream. But what if it’s more than that? When she becomes obsessed with a woman she sees at a cafe and begins to imbue ALL the dream-devices she creates with some facet of that woman, she’s surprised to be confronted by the woman herself, who has spent her own nights trapped in other people’s dreams and wants to learn to do it to the dream crafter as recompense. It’s a story about obsession more than love, a story that could fall into horror after the end but doesn’t quite if only because it ends before the tables get turned. Escape Rating B

“John Hollowback and the Witch” c2023
This was a fairy tale that could have come straight out of the Brothers Grimm. Well, it’s grim enough, anyway. It’s also feminist in the same way that “Florilegia” is, in that a story that’s traditionally told from the male perspective is instead told from the point of view of the women in the story who are caught in his trap. And it is a trap, very much in the same way that the arsehole in the author’s The River Has Roots is a trap. The trap of a man playing the social game to his own advantage while weaving a web around a woman who does not want him but is too polite, or too passive, or too rulebound, to resist – especially when everyone around her only sees the surface of him and not the evil underneath. But in this case someone did, took a literal pound of flesh out of his back AND the memories in his head, and set him back out in the world with the hole in his soul exposed for all the world to see. The only way for him to get his missing parts back is to acknowledge that they’re missing because of all the lies he told himself about, basically, what a nice guy he is. Escape Rating A with more than a bit of well-deserved bite.

“Florilegia, Or, Some Lies about Flowers” c2019
Back again to the tale of Blodeuwedd, although this time it hews considerably closer to the original tale in the Mabinogion. Albeit with a feminist twist. Because this time around, instead of believing all the men telling her that they made her to be what they want her to be, she chooses to make herself. I liked the concept of the story but found the language to be a bit, well, flowery, as if in imitation of the language of the original and that didn’t quite work for me. Escape Rating B

“Pockets” c2015
This was a terrific little closing story for the collection. It starts with an idea, that sometimes pockets are tiny wormholes in reality, that the stuff that’s put into one person’s pocket somewhere in the world comes out of an entirely different pocket somewhere else. There’s all sorts of directions this story could have gone, but instead of truly going down the rabbit hole of scientific exploration on the true nature of pocket wormholes, it turns into something uplifting about filling in holes in each other’s psyches so that the world as a whole, or at least the people in it, are a bit more whole. Especially if they share the contents of each other’s hearts and souls instead of just a bit of pocket lint. Escape Rating A-

Escape Rating Overall A-: Unsurprisingly, not all of the stories worked for this reader, and that’s generally true of such collections. Not every anything works for every reader every time. Howsomever, the standout stories in this collection, “Seasons of Glass and Iron”, “And Their Lips Rang with the Sun”, “A Hollow Play”, “John Hollowback and the Witch” and even “Pockets” each did something special in their own marvelous ways.

Something that did work in every story, however, was the narration of the audiobook version by Rachel Elizabeth Smith. She made all the stories sing and and turned the poetry – even the poems whose language I did not understand – into beautiful music. I will look for this narrator again, AND I will certainly pick up the author’s next book when it appears – hopefully in the not too distant future.