Beautiful Sorrows by Mercedes M. Yardley

My simple review for Beautiful Sorrows by Mercedes M. Yardley is if you’re into the sort of thing these stories do, then you’ll like this collection, and if you’re not into that sort of thing, then you won’t.

Simple, right? Maybe.

Figuring out where you lie on that spectrum requires looking at what these stories might be doing and figuring out if that’s your thing or not. And an easy way of deciding that is asking yourself how do you feel about exquisiteness. Things delicate, beautiful, and potentially possessing more alluring surfaces than their interiors might warrant.

Beautiful Sorrows features twenty-seven stories, ranging from paragraph long micro-fictions to a single novella length. It’s a mix of the fantastic (Fairy Tale variety) and the dark (Neil Gaiman variety). But it’s the sheer exquisiteness of these stories that provides the through-line that holds them all together.

Whether it’s the painful briefness “Broken”, the macabre wryness of “The ABCs of Murder”, or the fairy tale tweeness of “The Boy Who Hangs the Stars”, these stories one and all are exquisite. What they might lack in substance they make up for in emotional content and taut shiny surfaces. So even if my impression of a story was that it was light and ephemeral like a bubble, the emotion that lingered after the bubble burst might be as much the point of the story as the pleasure that came from the words written on the page.

Or when the fae tweeness got so thick my eyes rolled back in my skull to rattle around for a bit, there was always this exquisiteness to keep my attention: the well-executed surface that I could admire. Although some stories did leave a bad taste after I’d finished them, and I suspect the reaction was not one Yardley intended. These however seemed to revel in those sorts of seductions that from my perspective border on the creepily abusive, but when presented in the book there’s no such rejection of that behavior. (“Sweet, Sweet Sonja T.” I’m looking at you.)

Overall these are well-crafted and richly imaginative stories. Whether they will remain in your mind once you put the book down I can’t say, but maybe not a requirement for you to enjoy or appreciate them. At least it wasn’t for me.