Erika's Reviews > Maps to Nowhere

** Full disclosure: I received this book in exchange for an honest review**
You can tell the author knows her mythologies, folk tales, and legends as she uses her anthropology background in this short story collection to wonderful effect.
This collection is actually a first for me, it's both the first time I've read anything by this author and it's quite possibly the first short story collection where I enjoyed and loved every single story. I can't even think of a weak one in the bunch.

Many of the stories have a dark edge to them, a hint of the monsters hiding underneath so to speak, especially the ones that seemed mythology or fairytale based and that tone worked perfectly. It really made then feel like ancient stories instead of the cleaned up and safe versions we tell today.

My favorite story was the last one though, “Love, Cayce”, this is possibly the best epistolary based story I have ever read and it had me laughing out loud on the train. I really hope the author follows up and does more with the characters.
Beyond that I'm not going to review each story, I'm just going to say that I enjoyed them all, they all felt just the right length with no sense of the story being rushed or truncated to fit the short story format. They all just worked for me and resonated with me.

I read this in an e-book format and my app did not allow me to follow the links at the end of each story for notes, but they were all included at the very end of the book and they gave nice insights into the inspirations for or what happened while she was writing each story and they we well worth reading as well so don't skip those.

As I said above, this was my first experience with this author but it won't be my last, I am really looking forward to reading more by her as soon as I can.