Setting aside the irritatingly quirky format (this book contains two sets of unrelated stories, bound back-to-back and flipped upside down, which... no) this is a solid collection. I was slightly disappointed to figure out that the thief side consists of the four Terazin stories from Relative Magic, and one of the wizard stories I'd read... somewhere else, but the rest of the wizard set was charming and funny and entirely worthwhile. ( )

I've read a little of Tanya Huff's Blood Ties series, and they are good, but the magical genre gives her a great forum to show off her humour and quick mind. These short stories are just yummy! ( )

One book, two heroines, so I suppose I ought to divide this review in two parts as well. Generally though, the one word that comes to mind is: delightful.

Magdalene is the world's most powerful wizard. She's also quite cheerfully interested in having sex, fearless, wise and disinclined to get mixed up in plots, conspiracies or epic quests to save the world. Especially the last story (Why Wizards Shouldn't Make a Council and All Get Together to Set Down Rules for All Other Wizards) is simply brilliant.

Terazin is a thief who, in the first story, meets and falls in love with a mercenary. (A female one, I should perhaps add.) Her stories are less whimsical, but none the less enjoyable for that.

If you're tired of epic quests and your typical sword & sorcery-story, this book's the perfect in-between snack. ( )

Eh. The stories in this book were amusing, but not much more than that. I had read several of them before in Huff's other collections, and I frankly liked them better then. This might have been because I'm not terribly enamored with the Magdelene and Terazin characters and reading a whole book of their stories was a bit much for me.

I love Huff's tendency of prefacing the stories in her collections with information specific to each of them, but that tendency was regrettably absent here. Instead, Huff wrote a short Author's Afterward and stuck it at the end of each of the character sections. This could have been nice way of slipping in that information in a slightly different manner, but the two Afterwards were word-for-word identical and this was pretty disappointing.

I also thought the flip-style format of this 2005 edition was gimmicky, unnecessary, and distracting. This edition, however, included two additional stories than did the 1999 edition, so it's still the edition I'd recommend reading if you were so inclined. ( )

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2009/04/30-stealing-magic-tanya-huff.html ( )