Review: A Strange Penance

A Strange Penance by Cassandra Byrne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-star review. More like 3.5 stars but not enough to push it to 4.

This is a pretty good story about a guy who just wants to go back to a time when his mom read him books. But life hands him a shit sandwich and he ends up being a pretty rough and tumble character in trouble with the authorities and set on a bad path.

Things go bad. And then worse. And a little better. If you don't think about the plot much, this is a pretty good story. By the end, I wanted to know more about the characters.

But it ends just as the characters and the story are going someplace. It really felt like the start of a pretty good novella rather than the beginning-middle-end of a short story. Kind of frustrating, but in a good way.

However, when you think about the story, there are a couple of elements that really stick out. The first is the power imbalance between our anti-hero and his benefactor. In any other tale, we would questioned the benefactor's motives and certainly questioned whether the power imbalance would allowed any long-term relationship to be legitimate/successful.

The second is that the relationship between our anti-hero and his benefactor at the end of the story isn't really earned. A little work...just a couple of sentences...earlier in the story to justify the later relationship would have been enough. Call it Chekov's Love Gun.

I'm not giving away the details as I don't want to spoil the story. It is worth a read. Give it a buy/try.

View all my reviews

Minor edits for grammar 2/20/2025

Review: The Incident with the Pirate

The Incident with the Pirate by Cassandra Byrne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a 5-star review.

I don't want to spoil a great story. Spend a buck and buy this. Very well done.

View all my reviews

Hugo Awards - 2021 - Short Stories

 I've been read other books lately and had not intended to return to the Hugo nominees.  But as I had them downloaded anyway....

1 - “Metal Like Blood in the Dark”, T. Kingfisher (Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2020) - a great little story about the loss of innocence for a pair AI driven robots.  Or at least one of them

2 - “A Guide for Working Breeds”, Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, ed. Jonathan Strahan (Solaris)) - An interesting twist on AI/robots as contract labor.  You never really see where the humans intersect with the AI/robots, but it's there all along.

3 - No Award

4 - “The Mermaid Astronaut”, Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 2020) - a somewhat interesting space travel story with merfolk added on the side.  Good, but not above the bar on my ballot.

5 - “Open House on Haunted Hill”, John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots – 2020, ed. David Steffen) - a pedestrian haunted house story.  Nice, but not really notable.

6 - “Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse”, Rae Carson (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2020) - Surviving the zombie apocalypse without men.  But they still want babies.  Almost half of which will end up being men.  Illogical setting/world building.

7 - Little Free Library, Naomi Kritzer (Tor.com) - a twee little story using a plot device that has been done too many times already.