The Lay of Lilyfinger by G.V. Anderson
My rating: 3/5 cats
She reached over her shoulder gingerly. They’d grown a little with her shedding, her wing stubs, but they would never regenerate, not fully. Not as well as some lizards regrew their tails. They would protrude just enough to invite disgust, to upset the cut of her clothes, to catch in doorways. She would have to ligate them—tie them off with cord to cut off the blood supply—before the bone formed. Painful, yet necessary.
my objective self appreciates the author’s inventiveness and craft, my subjective self says “meh.”
i read her other free tor short (Hearts in the Hard Ground) last year, and found it lovely and sad PLUS it scored some bonus points for cat and zombie bird content.
this story, while longer and much more ambitious in scope, was not my particular cuppa—or it wasn’t my particular cuppa at the time of my reading—as we all know, the reader’s mood carries as much weight as the writer’s skills when it comes to what we get out of a story. and i’ll be honest, this one didn’t linger in my readerheart. it’s certainly well-written, and she manages to cram a lot of detail and worldbuilding into a relatively short story (although fairly long by tor-short-standards), but it’s a wrong story/wrong reader situation, and i’m swiping…whichever way one swipes to release the story into the wild to find its better-matched reader.
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2021/05/05/the-la…
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