I normally tend to be fairly resistant to anthologies. (I tend to feel like I need to read every story in full for it to "count," yet the variety of authors means often one story or another doesn't work of me.) But I was sold on this almost entirely due to Carlos Hernandez's involvement. And I did not live to regret it.

Hernandez's story -- "Your Two Better Halves: A Dream, with Fairies, in Spanglish" was my favorite, as expected. The story is a choose-your-own adventure encounter with fey, with a personality quiz aspect as your story choices determine your options for the two halves of your fairy self at the end. I was so charmed by EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS. (I was half sturdy tree, half planetarium, by the way.)

That story would have been worth the price of admission alone, but I also loved "See a Fine Lady" by Seanan McGuire (a woman rides a unicorn into Target), "Or Perhaps Up" by C.S.E. Cooney (a woman takes an ill-fated river journey on a swan boat), among others. In general the collected tended to be a bit darker than my usual preferences, but I found enough delights here to be very happy with the book overall. ( )

Like most anthologies, this has a lot of highs and lows and in-betweens. Unfortunately, I felt like there were more lows than anything while reading this, and even the highs were more like just okay stories that I found entertaining. Overall, my biggest grievance is that the overall reading level of the stories felt like YA or younger, despite the content being very adult. If this was a YA collection that would be perfect, but NetGalley has this categorized as adult. (I double-checked halfway through reading it because I genuinely couldn't remember.)

My rating is based on an average of all the story ratings, rounded to the nearest integer.

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Individual story ratings:

Quest for Tear Heaven - 2 Stars
This one just sort of seemed like it was written for young kids.

Glamour - 2 stars
I didn't care for the plot or the characters. The dialogue also wasn't that well-written, in my honest opinion.

See a Fine Lady - 3 stars
This was cute and whimsical. It was a pleasant enough read, but nothing really special about it.

Or Perhaps Up - 1 star
I honestly felt like the writing in this story was trying too hard to sound descriptive, including what I suspect was the misuse of a thesaurus. Did not end up even finishing the story as I didn't care for it.

Don't Let Go - 3 stars
This was engaging and fun to read, but nothing particularly blew me away about it.

The Loophole - 4 stars
A pretty solid story overall, but the romance aspect seemed a little contrived.

The Last Time of Master Tranquil Cloud - 2 stars
Took too long to kick off, I think a lot of the exposition could have been cut. I ended up skipping the story because I was bored in a few pages.

Your Two Better Halves - Not Rated
I decided to skip rating this one. It's a choose-your-own-adventure, which sounds fun in theory, but in practice is a pain in the fucking ass to try to read on a kindle. I don't want to rate the story poorly because of that, but I wasn't really able to engage with it in the way intended so I ended up skipping the story completely.

Take Only Photos - 2 stars
The writing felt like geared toward a YA audience, despite the main character being a full-on adult. That just didn't work for me.

Old Twelvey Night - 4 stars
Very well-written, entertaining, the perfect amount of whimsical. I really enjoyed this one.

The Seal Woman's Tale - 4 stars
The best story of the bunch. I thought this was really well-written, engaging, and the character work was just right for the length. Maybe more like 4.5 stars, but I only rate in whole numbers.

The Storyteller - 3 Stars
I'm not mad at this one, but it also didn't do anything for me.

Summer Skin - 3 Stars
I don't know how to feel about this one. The writing was decent, though, so I guess 3 stars is fair.

Colt's Tooth - 2 stars
Not a very strong ending to the anthology. I feel pretty shrug emoji about this.

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An e-ARC was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for honest review. ( )