Fun twist on the genre. ( )

Worth buying for the ludicrous glory that is the cover, and so much more. ( )

Here's a bunch of women who don't wait for "a knight in shining armor to save her from a fate worse that death." She's perfectly capable to do it herself. ( )

This review was also published, in a slightly enhanced & more comfortable format, at my blog between drafts.

Not every story in this collection, the third in the Chicks in Chainmail series, is spot-on, but there’s only one real dead, umh, horse that I will mercifully abstain to flog. Several stories are just plain brilliant, and the majority is exceptionally funny. Self-directed irony abounds, and orgiastic playfulness with postmodern meta-levels and meta-twists.

What’s more, these stories are really feminist. It’s not your occasional outstanding female super hero, super specialist, super assassin, super daredevil pilot, or anything like that, but mostly nuts-and-bolts female heroes from the rank-and-file. They’re grunts, for goddess’s sake, and they brawl, they fart, and they drink like a fish. One of my favorite lines, from Kate Daniels’s “… But Comedy is Hard” (set in ancient Greece), comes when the first person narrator remembers her sergeant after having gone AWOL for various reasons: “To this day I wonder when Glycera realized I was gone. Sometimes I miss the old battle-ax.” (246)

I’m not too much into fantasy; it was science fiction that started to rule my world when I was a kid. But if more fantasy stories had been like this, I’m sure I’d opted for a more balanced reading diet.

"Introduction" (Esther M. Friesner)
"Myth Manners' Guide to Greek Missology #1: Andromeda and Perseus" (Harry Turtledove)
"Chain, Link, Fence" (Steven Piziks)
"Fool's Gold" (Elizabeth Moon)
"In for a Pound" (Lawrence Watt-Evans)
"Death Becomes Him" (Marina Frants)
"Straight Arrow" (Susan Shwartz)
"Bad Heir Day" (Rosemary Edghill)
"Why Do You Think They Call It Middle Earth?" (Susan Casper)
"Leg Irons, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe" (Laura Frankos)
"Shiftless" (Josepha Sherman)
"May/December at the Mall" (Brian D. Akers)
"Yo, Baby!" (Jan Stirling)
"Don't Break the Chain!" (Jody Lynn Nye)
"Cross CHILDREN Walk" (Esther M. Friesner)
"...But Comedy is Hard" (Kate Daniel)
"Baubles, Bangles and Beads" (Kevin Andrew Murphy)
"Hallah Iron-Thighs and the Five Unseemly Sorrows" (K. D. Wentworth)
"Miss Underwood and the Mermaid" (Sarah Zettel) ( )