And how are the stories, overall? I found the book as a whole to be quite disappointing. The stories are mostly very short -- there are 25 stories in a book a bit more than 100,000 words long. Now there are plenty of outstanding stories at lengths less than 4,000 words, but in this case too many of the stories are sketches. Often, key details are baldly told, not shown. Often, the backstory is quickly sketched in, not developed. Often, the heroine's abilities are arbitrarily revealed, not in any sense organic or believable. Most of the pieces are competently assembled sentence by sentence, but too many are poorly structured scene by scene, or are unconvincing as to plot logic.

I'll mention a few of the better pieces. Dorothy J. Heydt has been assembling a sort of mosaic novel about her character Cynthia with short stories in many of these Sword and Sorceress books. They are set in the ancient Mediterranean, and the Greek gods are real characters. "Lord of the Earth" has Cynthia travelling to Corinth, and there encountering Poseidon in a bad mood. Two stories use very similar twists involving magical familiars, though they are otherwise quite different: both were light and enjoyable: "Familiars" by Michael H. Payne, set at a magic school with a squirrel as the familiar; and "All too Familiar" by P. Andrew Miller, in which a hedge witch inherits a variety of familiars whose wizards and witches have been killed by an evil sorcerer. Laura J. Underwood's "The Curse of Ardal Glen" is a bit darker than most of these stories, about a town which has had to sacrifice a young woman to a mysterious smith every seven years for decades. Dorothy J. Heydt's daughter Meg Heydt contributes "Openings", which I liked for its engaging main character and her slightly unexpected talent. Esther Friesner is usually reliable, and her story, "Grain", is solid entertainment, about a girl apprenticed to a brewer woman, who encounters a goddess with a god problem. And the longest story included, Michael Spence's "Pride, Prejudice, and Paranoia", has an engaging set of characters (students at a magic school) and a nice setup (the heroine's husband has failed his exams, apparently because of magic interference), which make it a nice read, though the ending is rather a mess.

So the book isn't entirely a loss, but it is disappointing. I think Bradley had rigid ideas about story structure, and about story content, and her editing projects suffer from including too many stories that read too similarly, and from being too forgiving of competently written stories which fit her template but which have no fire -- no originality -- no special reason to make one want to read them. If you've been reading these books with enjoyment all along, this one will probably satisfy, though I don't think it's as good as some of the earlier volumes. Otherwise, I can't really recommend the book.