Book Review: Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue

I'm still trying to figure out the factors that broke through my "reading block" in the past month. One definitely seems to be adding hard-copy books back into the mix, which is how I picked up this one. Another factor I'm beginning to suspect may have helped was trying to stop think about reading as "reading to review" and just read. It's not like I have a significant "voice" as a reviewer, and I started out posting reviews of books just to have a space to think about them a little more. But it's also the case (especially as an author myself) that I know the impact that even small voices can have in the aggregate in giving books visibility. (Even if those small voices aren't necessarily enthusiastic. I spend a lot of time focusing on sapphic fiction and my place in the book ecosystem. So it can be easy for a quiet voice to whisper that I have an obligation to read certain types of books. Which...no, I don't. And maybe that's part of my problem. Anyway, on to the review.

Not so much a collection of short fairy-tale-inspired stories as a chained series, reminiscent of the 1001 Nights, in which each narrator concludes by asking a secondary character in her story to explain what her back-story is. The tales are familiar but their interpretations are new and decidedly queer. The structure made it hard for me to put down, due to the individual stories being so bite-sized, and the tantalizing way they were linked together. “Just one more, then I’ll put it down.” Emma Donoghue is a great writer at any length, but if you want a seductive introduction to her style, this is a good entry point.