It's a good anthology, with 10/12 stories engaging me, and even the ones that didn't were good in their own right. My absolute favorite piece was McDonald's; Bear's story was enchanting; Hand's story was just beautiful. The anthology had a good diversity, considering its theme was paranormal romance. Not all stories had happy endings, and not all stories had a traditional romance. Definitely worth checking out if you write any kind of speculative fiction with romantic elements, and romance readers, I think you ought to check this out solely for the intro, which I found fascinating.

I do have one nitpick about the anthology: typos. I kept wanting to check my copy to make sure it wasn't an ARC, there were so many typos: missing quotation marks, missing punctuation: stuff like that can really trip the reader up, and there were plenty of times I wondered who was speaking, or if I was reading dialogue or exposition. And I don't want to blame either the authors of these stories or the publishing house, cause I'm sure the mistakes were a mix of both, but there were plenty of them, and spread out through the entire anthology.

No matter: I'll be happy to buy the next volume when it comes out.

For a full review, which contains a story-by-story reaction which may or may not include spoilers, please click here: http://calico-reaction.livejournal.com/32743.html ( )

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, the title of this new speculative fiction anthology garnered a bit of controversy–especially among rabid romance genre fans–because “paranormal romance” apparently means different things to different people. I’d say: disregard the title. The stories that stuck in my mind were either the funny ones (Delia Sherman’s Walpurgis Afternoon, Heather Shaw’s Single White Farmhouse, Sarah Prineas’s A Treatise on Fewmets) or the ones that had some interesting use of language (Elizabeth Bear’s Follow Me Light, Elizabeth Hand’s Calypso in Berlin). Although BNPR is probably not going to supplant my fan-ish enthusiasm for YBFH, it’s overall a promising start to a new anthology series. I’d definitely check out the next one. (Aside: Bear and Sherman’s stories also appear in the 19th edition of YBFH. I first read Hand’s story on SciFiction, a mag edited by one of the editors of YBFH.)