This was the worst copyediting job I've ever seen, hands down. That aside, though, I love Tanya Huff and I adore her short stories as much as any of her longer stuff. ( )

Several very good stories, some just good, and one really bad - Tam Lin with Tam (Tom) and Janet both largely oblivious skateboarders. Puck, who's pretty peripheral, was the only sympathetic character - though by the end I felt sorry for the Queen. The other modern fairy tale, Jack (and the Beanstalk) is much better - partly because Jack is more active than Tam. I really liked the bartender story, and now want to hear Brenda Sutton's song - but Tanya never said what it was! I'll have to hunt it down. I'd read the Evil Overlord, Magdalene, and all three Valdemar stories before - good, but not wonderful. The Terizan, Summoner, Torin, and Smoke stories were all new - and I really hope she follows up the Smoke one, that set up an…_interesting_… situation. And various others - Reuben is interesting, I didn't much like the Fate one, the Brownies were funny(!), and the cook was sneaky! The only one I disliked was Tam Lin, and it was mostly because the character was so strongly a person I didn't like. Which is a compliment to her writing. Oh, and an interesting essay by Erica Neely at the end, about the underlying themes of Tanya's stories. Overall, very good. It took me quite a while to read, mostly because I got stuck on Tam Lin - ended up mostly skimming that one just to get the gist without having to see too much of Tom. Then I got past it and into much better stuff, and finished it in a night. There were a lot of typo-variety errors - things that a spellcheck should have caught, even. Yes, I'm pickier than most readers (daughter of two English teachers, automatic proofreader), but still. ( )