This book is for the reviews of the stories submitted to via the now-obsolete Pink Alpaca Reads. Beware: honest opinions ahead.
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What I loved: This collection is just so sweet, brimming with romance, fluff, and lessons about reality and relationships all throughout. It's a light (cough) collection and if you're looking for a bunch of sweet love stories, this one should fit the bill. Since it's an anthology, the characters and the plot doesn't carry on but there are certainly memorable ones that stuck in my head and I was able to remember them even as I move to the other stories. The thought, the passion, and the sincerity of the author in this collection are what drew me in. It's just so good. uwu.
What didn't work: Nothing, really. This collection is quite good, prose-wise, and really thoughtful and inclusive, story-wise.
What to improve: A lot of it comes from the technical side of things. Punctuation errors, especially in dialogues, are quite numerous, especially in the earlier stories. There are some sentences and clauses that could use a few commas and some that would sound better without.
I've got some issues with dialogue tags as well, and this is quite noticeable in the first few parts where the characters just talk and talk with literally no tags to tell me who's speaking. It confuses me since I get lost with who's who so yeah. A really quick fix to that is to have the characters interact with each other or with the setting and one will find that this technique will also widen the space for character introspection so that the character voice can be more noticeable and stronger.
Next would be the telling. I don't think this is the case with the latter and newer stories since those actually quite slapped, technical-wise. But the earlier stories, which is really crucial to get people to continue reading the whole anthology, contained a spattering of telling.
It's not all bad but it does make me feel like the story is just hurrying me along and not letting me soak in the characters' world or feelings. Then again, I really cannot blame anyone since these are all short stories so telling is actually a tool used to get the point out there in a quick but efficient way. And, as I said, the latest stories have improved in this department and I spotted fewer and fewer instances.
Lastly, there are a few typos, missing words, and wrong words used but it's nothing that a good line-edit or proofreading wouldn't fix.
Final verdict: This is 9/10 on my scale. The stories are well-crafted with enough thought, passion, and heart written inside each one. Some are walks down memory lane while some are the author's attempt to write about the things they want to talk about. In a way, this collection is very much eye-opening in terms of non-conventional relationship arrangements, especially in the lgbtq+ community. I like the stories' take on well-known tropes and how they are subverted. I just love everything. uwu. Keep writing, Birthe. You've seriously got it in you. <3
