A Phoenix First Must Burn by Patrice Caldwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A Phoenix First Must Burn is an all-female anthology of Black speculative fiction comprised of sixteen stories that range from soldiers fighting space orcs to a girl who discovers she can freeze time.
This anthology remined me a lot of another one, A Universe of Wishes by the We Need Diverse Books organization, and it featured some of the same writers.
Overall, I liked these stories, but my top three favorites are: 3) All The Time in the World by Charlotte Nicole Davis, 2) Letting The Right One In by Patrice Caldwell, and 1) The Goddess Provides by LL McKinney.
All The Time in the World is written in second person POV and you assume the role of Jordan, a Black high schooler who develops time-freezing abilities after years of consuming water contaminated by a local chemical plant, that has hidden this fact until people developed sores, got sick, and died.
Letting The Right One In is a Sapphic romance about a vampire-obsessed Black girl who meets and falls for a Black female vampire.
The Goddess Provides is a high fantasy story about a princess who is hunted down for renouncing the tutelar Goddess after her mother dies suddenly from an illness. This gave me major Children of Blood and Bone vibes and I’m here for it; I’d love to read a novel-length manuscript of this story.
My only criticisms of this anthology are 1) I felt like many of the stories ended without a definitive climax, and 2) the lengths of the stories varied so much, leading to an uneven pace. But these issues weren’t enough to detract from my enjoyment of the book too much.
I give A Phoenix First Must Burn 4.5 out of 5 stars. Read this if you haven’t already!
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