Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man by Rich Larson
My rating: 5/5 cats
WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the SEVENTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your annual reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
GR has deleted the pages for several of the stories i’ve read in previous years without warning, leaving me with a bunch of missing reviews and broken links, which makes me feel shitty. i have tried to restore the ones i could, but my to-do list is already a ball of nightmares, so that’s still a work-in-progress. however, because i don’t have a lot of time to waste, and because my brain has felt scraped clean ever since my bout with covid, i’m not going to bother writing much in the way of reviews for these, in case GR decides to scrap ’em again.
i am doing my best.
merry merry.
DECEMBER 4
an absolutely perfect fucking story. if you like murderbot, you’re gonna love butterfly man.
for me, this was extra sweet because i love rich larson, yet i wasn’t crazy about his most recent novel, Ymir*, which lukewarm response was purely a genre-not-for-me situation. but this, THIS!!! i loved every moment of it. it is on the longer side of the tor-short spectrum, so carve out enough time that you won’t be interrupted by the hard limits of your commute, your lunch hour, your child’s afternoon nap and GET INTO IT. if a whole story cycle about these characters set in this world existed, i would be a happier person.
* Ymir was actually the last book i was able to review before covid ate my brain and left me with a cavern of head-pudding instead. that was in JULY! beezus christ.
2022:
DECEMBER 1: PORGEE’S BOAR – JONATHAN CARROLL
DECEMBER 2: SKELETON SONG – SEANAN MCGUIRE
DECEMBER 3: JUDGE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING MANUSCRIPT – LAVIE TIDHAR
FROM THE BEFORETIMES:
2016 short story advent calendar
2017 short story advent calendar
2018 short story advent calendar
2019 short story advent calendar
2020 short story advent calendar
2021 short story advent calendar
read my book reviews on goodreads
