I loved this collection! Neumeier’s stories are vivid and atmospheric and hopeful. If anything else ties them, it is the place grief and loss have in most of the characters’ pasts and how the stories are then about those characters discovering something positive and new.

Heart’s Desire is a coda to The City in the Lake, while Fire and Earth is a coda to The Griffin Mage trilogy. There are some notable similarities between the two novellas: each begins with a man, restless and melancholy, who goes out -- one rides, the other walks -- and comes across a widow in need of help. But in the details, like the setting, the widow’s circumstances and her role in the story, and what happens next, these stories are both different.
I especially liked how Fire and Earth ties in with the The Griffin Mage and how it sets out to give a happier ending to a character who needed one, while still fitting the mood of the trilogy. So very satisfying!

The Audition, set after The Floating Islands, is about a girl who gets a chance to audition to be kajurai and fly on the winds. I’d really like a sequel to this.

The Kieba takes place generations before The Mountain of Kept Memory. I liked the way tension built in this story. (Also, there was a detail which I just really liked for personal reasons).

My favourite of the shorter stories was “Lila”, an urban fantasy about unexpected dragon hatchings, an artist living in her late-mother’s house and a fluffy dog.

A dragon whipped by overhead, pearl and smoke in the afternoon light, and Mad unclenched her hands and made herself smile at the wildly barking Lila, who was tugging at the end of the leash, so sure she could catch that dragon if Mad would only let her try. Lila had no idea of her own tininess, her fragility. Lila didn’t doubt herself, or fear that she might be about to hurl herself into a quest that was too big for her. ( )