Customer Reviews

Sisters Odd: Curious Bedtime Stories

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There was a portal--a hole in the rock face--behind the icefall--around the sculpture of the centaur. And if you go through the portal, you reach "yesterday" according to one of E. J. McFall's modern-day fairy tales. She asks, "Given the chance, what would you change about your past? Your career choice? Your mate? Your children? What would you do or not do if you had it all to do over again?" Like falling into yesterday. Similar to most fairy tales, the outcome is not always certain. Something can, and usually does, go wrong.

Sisters Odd gives us seventeen different stories, each of which brings new thoughts about the environment, depression, visions, death, enigmas, fairies, faith, surrogate mothers, the power of the universe, and much more. There's something for everyone. The best part may be the lessons we can learn from these tales about nonconformists. Like one of the characters who is bored... most bored... really, truly, exceptionally bored. More bored than any human being has ever been in the history of boredom. So she decides to create an enigma in her town. After reading this particular story, I began to wonder if that's not how a lot of unexplainable mysteries start. Perhaps we are alone in the cosmos.

As McFall writes, "Even if we do manage to go back in time, we don't have any guarantee that we'll make our lives better. We could just make matters worse." What to do? It's like falling into the abyss.

Each one of these "fairy tales" gave me pause. I couldn't tell what was going on, but then there would be a lesson at the end. It made for interesting reading, something out of the ordinary. A treat for those of us who are, or want to be, nonconformists.

by Doris Anne Roop-Benner
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviewsorg
reviewing books by, for, and about women

"Don't dance in red shoes. Don't trade your only cow for magic beans. Don't leave home without a pocketful of breadcrumbs. And, most importantly, don't open locked doors in strange houses."

Yeah, right.

I was extremely excited to have ordered this book because the description offers something more: a tiny glimpse into that sealed-off area of our minds that once, we as children were able to see into so clearly. I thought that I would be taking a light journey back to that realm, something along the lines of Neil Gaiman or Garth Nix.

It turns out, the description on the back of the book is the only thing that remotely alludes to that child-like magic. The stories Ms. McFall has written have no flow, no current into one another. There is no sense of connection between them, with the exception of the reocurrence of the word kismet, which continuously sprouted up from the page in numerous stories. Many of the stories have interesting starts, but unfortunately slowly fizzle into nothing like the end of a Fourth of July sparkler. Almost all of the endings are tacked on, leaving the audience disoriented and unsatisfied.

In the end, all you're left with is an author claiming to walk the nonconformed path, when in reality it's just a book catering to preteens who fancy the idea that shopping at Hot Topic makes them individuals. Other 'noncomformists', (the author takes delight in this word to categorize an audience she thinks will set her book apart from any other psuedo-Gothic pulp fiction), I think will be as disappointed as I.