Book Review

Her Magical Pet, edited by Rachel Manija Brown

Her Magical Pet is a collection of SFF short stories featuring women in love and their magical pets. It was put together as a fundraiser for OutRight Action International, an organisation that fights for the rights of LGBTIQA people worldwide. It is a collection of gentle, low-tension stories about women in love with women, or women falling in love with women, featuring cute magical pets and happy ever afters.

About half the stories are traditional romances in the sense that the protagonists meet for the first time, or at least acknowledge their love for the first time in the course of the story. The others feature established couples living their happy ever afters. Many of the stories were evidently sequels or part of an existing world already built by that author; I didn’t find it hard to follow any of them, but I suspect some of the happy ever after stories would have been more satisfying to me if I had already been friends with the characters beforehand. The heroines are a pretty diverse bunch – there are teenagers and middle aged women and several-hundred-year-old vampires and shapeshifters and everything in between; there are several heroines of colour; there are heroines who are fat and who are thin and who have no particular shape at all; and there are heroines who are bi as well as heroines who are lesbian. No disability rep that I noticed, but other than that, quite a nice mix.

As for the pets…well, I saw the original call for stories and one of the rules was that nothing bad must happen to the pets. So if, like me, you can’t cope with animal cruelty in stories, don’t worry: each and every one of these pets has a very good time in the stories. (Some of them are rescue pets or have been injured prior to the start of the story, but only good things happen to them on the page). The pets include a number of magical cats and dogs, but also psychic dolphins, baby griffins, a small animated piece of chaos, magical hedgehogs, vampire bats and not one, but two toys come to life (one pegasus, one unicorn).

I have a lot of favourites in this anthology. It started strongly, with ‘Deep Spring Farm’ by Romana Clifton, which features Melanie, who can see spirits and is trying to tame a ghost dog, and Jenn, a farmer whose lettuce keeps getting trampled at night by unknown entities. It’s a gentle, sweet story in which they work together to find out what is up with the lettuce, and fall in love along the way. There’s some cute banter too:

Jenn stared at her a moment, and then laughed delightedly. “Okay, okay, but I have to say: I am a simple farm girl, and I like to be direct. Is this a real ritual, or are you flirting with me?”

“Both,” Melanie said boldly. “It is a genuine ritual and I’ve done it a couple times with mentors whose spirit sight was more powerful than mine. But also, right now I would take any excuse to drink wine and hold hands with you. Is that okay?”

‘Lucky Day’, by Yoon Ha Lee, is a fun little story about two gamer girls discovering their mutual crush while protecting an accidentally animated toy unicorn. This one is pure fairy floss in story form: sweet, but lacking in substance. I liked it a fair bit, but it was very much not what I was expecting, given the dark, twisty, political, character driven stories in the Machineries of Empire novels.

‘Beach Dirt on Bare Feet’ by Louise Long, is an F/F selkie story and I loved it. It had a really strong sense of place and feel of the sea about it, and I loved that the story explored the ambivalence and well-earned lack of trust a selkie might feel towards humans. It felt very much in dialogue with the old selkie tales, and it just really, really worked for me. Also, I loved Morvoren’s reaction to tasting human food for the first time – especially ice cream.

‘Watercat Cafe’, by Rachel Manija Brown, is one of the longer stories in the anthology, and has the distinction of being the first post-apocalyptic story I’ve read in…maybe forever?…that I enjoyed. This is almost certainly because it is full of food. It is set in a world where the weather has become unpredictable, such that farming is not really possible, and humans have become nomadic, chasing weather that is liveable and food that is edible. In the midst of this, Ruthie finds an old book – a mystery novel set in a cafe – and while the concept of a cafe doesn’t even exist anymore in this time, she decides to create one anyway, a stopping point where passing caravans can stop and get a meal on their way to the next place.

Out fishing with her watercats – who are marvellous, trained, fishing cats – Ruthie stumbles across a wounded stranger and her dog. And the rest of the story is about Ruthie rescuing her, about Fern slowly getting stronger, about the two women slowly falling in love, reading aloud to each other, and cooking and eating a lot of food. Eventually, the question of why Fern was injured is resolved, as is the question of whether the cafe can even be feasible, but it’s mostly a leisurely, food-filled journey in a remote, precarious setting.

‘Uncontrolled Variable’ by Sara Joiner was enormous fun, with a scientist heroine who is trying to study magical sea-grass while also attempting to contain her seacat, Lincoln, who can teleport from any body of water he can fit into to another. And, in the way of all cats, the amount of water required for him to fit into it is…always smaller than you think. Take the level of chaos that an ordinary cat (there is no such thing as an ordinary cat!) can provide, and add in teleportation, a love of water, and the ability to turn on taps and you have something that is a delight to read about and probably hell to live with (though I did love the way the protagonists divide the night into shifts and decide in advance who the cat belongs to to at 3:27 am when he comes in dripping wet…):

Someday we’d find a harness that Lincoln couldn’t slip out of.

“Do you want help?” Lindsey called from the beach.

Pride fought realism to a draw. “…Maybe!” I lifted the leash. “I think I’m on the right track, though!” Splashing sounds from behind me. “And be careful of the eelgrass!”

“I know!” Lindsey sounded amused.

Did I care more about my cat than having to file a report admitting I’d had adverse effects on the site? Absolutely yes.

Did I still want to minimize the damage I’d be reporting?

… Also yes.

You’ll be glad to know that Lincoln finds his way into the Acknowledgments section of a scientific paper by the end of the story.

(Another pleasing scientist-and-cat combo was ‘The Mating Call of the Teleporting Warbler’ by Aster Glenn Gray, which was an epistolary story consisting of the letters of an ornithologist doing fieldwork to her partner back home, with the letters delivered by flying cat. Of course.)

‘A Dog’s Chance’, by Celia Lake, appealed to me very strongly with its 1920s-Bohemian-London setting, which reminded me very strongly of Harriet Vane and her friends in Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey books, only with magical hedgehogs in need of protection from new development. The magic took rather a back seat to the relationship and the setting, and it felt more strongly grounded in the real world than any of the other stories in this anthology. There was just something about those conversations where they were both trying to work out where they knew each other from, and also each trying to size up whether the other knew about magic, and whether the other might possibly be attracted to women that rang very true to me. Also, I just really liked Una.

Perhaps my favourite story in the anthology was ‘Five Quests and the Oracle’ by Pamela Dean. This is not surprising, as I’ve adored her work ever since I imprinted on Tam Lin as a student in the nineties. I love her characters, and I adore her voice. This story is set in the Liavek Universe, a shared world created in 1985 by fantasy authors Emma Bull and Will Shetterly. It’s a world with a lot of different religions and cultures and politics going on, and also magic, which is linked to the length of your mother’s labour when you were born.

‘Five Quests and the Oracle’ is set in the aftermath of a political assassination and revolution among the Red Priests, and starts with Dri’s mother worrying about her, because Dri works in the Red Priests’ library, and who knows where suspicion will fall next. And so she encourages Dri to…do something else. Anything else. She has many, many suggestions.

“Dri, you must be free of the Red Temple. What you do should be your own thought, but you seem unwilling to have any thoughts.”

“How can I when you keep having them and throwing them at me?” demanded Dri. “Nobody can think when it’s raining suggestions.

Melanin looked shocked and Sinja entertained. Kiffen’s face was unusually blank. Fortunately, their mother laughed. “I did desist for a tenday,” she said.

“The roads were all still flooded,” returned Dri.

In the end, Dri decides to audition for a part in a play at The Almond Tree theatre, where she meets Linden, who grew up in the theatre and is stagestruck.

Dean’s stories always leave me feeling that there are a bunch of extra things going on just outside the story that I can’t see,and her style can be a little bit elliptical, so in some ways it’s difficult to say what the story is about. Partly, it is Dri learning about the theatre and how a play comes to life, and falling in love with Linden. Partly, it is about Dri’s cat, Golly, who secures a role and must be convinced to play it (this involves a lot of dried fish and a lot of cat management – Golly is really the platonic ideal of a cat; entirely self-willed, into everything, and both charming and impossible at once). But a lot of it is also about family and colleagues and relationships and growing up and the different ways in which people argue (Dri’s family really loves arguing – Dri notes that it is almost a religion with them), and figuring out how to interact with people who have different cultural and family norms from yours. I found it deeply satisfying, and the romance was lovely, too.

Overall, I found this anthology highly enjoyable and relaxing to read. While there were a handful of stories that didn’t do a lot for me, there was nothing I actively disliked, and a lot that I either liked or loved – a very good batting average!

I think that any themed anthology will have what Anne of Green Gables might refer to as a ‘besetting sin’ – that thing where, if a story is going to have a problem, this is the problem it will have. In Her Magical Pet, the besetting sin was a lack of tension. While most of the stories were just lovely and relaxing, some were so lacking in conflict or suspense that they didn’t hold my attention at all. Indeed, this anthology took me a surprisingly long time to read, because there were at least two stories where I just sort of wandered off in the middle and forgot about them and read something else for a few days, which is not like me.

Having said that, if you don’t have the attention span for novels right now and just want to read something short and sweet where you know everything is going to be alright, this anthology would be an excellent choice. It’s fun, frequently funny, romantic, and above all, deeply kind to its readers.

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Her Magical Pet by Rachel Menija Brown

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  1. chacha1 says:

    Short stories are not generally my thing, but a) benefit b) magical pets, so I have acquired. I do not have a pet of my own at the present time and some low-tension love stories involving such things as the Platonic ideal of a cat sound really nice.

  2. cleo says:

    I was mildly interested and then I saw that my new favorite author, Aster Glenn Gray, has a story in it and now I’m all in.

  3. Kareni says:

    This sounds lovely, Catherine. I’ve added it to my evergrowing wishlist.

  4. Jo says:

    It sounds right up my alley.

    Zoe Chant and her magical flying kittens, micro unicorn, giant blue bugbear and teleporting puppies (yes!) of the Protection Inc, Defenders series introduced me to this and the similar MM anthology so I rushed to buy them, this is a reminder to actually read them both!

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