Little Free Library by Naomi Kritzer
My rating: 5/5 cats
If you can bring me more such books, I will leave you every scrap of gold I can find.
a perfect, adorable, FREE short story. the whole time i was reading it, i was braced for it to slant off into tweetown while still hoping it would be horror, since it is essentially the same set-up as my all-time favorite Amazing Stories episode:
because we’re all going through a thing right now and everyone’s a little on edge, i’ll spill the tone-beans THIS ONE TIME so you know what you’re getting into: it is not horror. and it stays on the “good” side of twee—i thought it was charming and i’m an old salty curmudgeon.
however, the story ends on one of those tingly BUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? notes that some of us—the old salty horror-loving curmudgeons of us—will imagine the next beats of in a way involving enough splatter to make y’all gentler folks faint dead away, but it’s not our fault—our tastes have taught us all too well that you shouldn’t take candy from strangers, or adopt a child or bring an animal into your home or communicate with entities you don’t fully understand <— none of which are true spoilers, but they all live in the same neighborhood of “cautionary tales this story is not teaching.”
still and all, it’s a fun story and reading it would be a nice and necessary break from watching the news and checking yourself for symptoms of vitamin d deficiency (i.e. DO I HAVE RICKETS?)
get to it, booknerds!
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2020/04/08/little…
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