weddings from hell by maggie shayne, jeaniene frost, terri garey, & kathryn smith

Some marriages are made in heaven . . . Some are not. What happens when “the happiest day of your life” turns into a nightmare? Forget the drunken best man or the bridesmaid dresses from the ’80s . . . none of these wedding day disasters can compare to a cursed bride determined to make it down the aisle, or a vampire who is about to disrupt your wedding.

I’m hard on short stories sometimes. They don’t satisfy me as much as a lengthy immersion into another world and a dynamic set of motivations strung out over a novel-length story. With short stories, escape is far too short, the fix like a matchstick flame. But my reading pleasures are also fickle sometimes. I get a craving for brain candy, when my intellectual energy runs low from too much work and having to decipher the logic of alien humans. This is why I acquire anthologies even when I rarely read them; I knew I would need them for emergencies. Weddings from Hell saved me from thinking too much for an hour or two, featuring four funny stories about paranormal bad boys and a ghostly wedding crasher. The writing strikes me as very chicklit-ish, not really my cup of tea but very calming at this time. So far, the only author that got more than my passing fancy is Terri Garey–I like the mystery element in Ghouls Night Out. I would buy her other books.

faery magic by mary jo putney, jo beverly, barbara samuel, and karen harbaugh

a delightful read, four stories about the romance between otherworldly beings and mortals.

the fairies here are magical, certainly, but still very human in the way they fall in love, in grieving over lost loves or ecstatic over love’s triumph… we need to have light reads every now and then; else our brain burns out from too much of reading critically acclaimed novels and 700-page tomes about ancient mysteries or volumes on the theories about the universe’s origins.

we so need happy endings interspersed in our reading choices!

my favorite is THE LOVE TALKER by Barbara Samuel… very passionate, about a rogue faery punished for seducing pretty mortal women to death, to fall in love truly with a homely girl. he chose to be mortal so he could be with her forever.

the other stories are THE LORD OF ELPHINDALE by Jo Beverly – shows faery’s ruthless side, THE FAERY BRAID by Karen Harbaugh – an almost-faery defies her fairy stepmother to be with the mortal man she loves, and DANGEROUS GIFTS by Mary Jo Putney – a faery lord manipulates a mortal girl so she will agree to be his wife but ends up with plans in disarray and bested by a faery woman from India.