“C. S. E. Cooney is one of the most moving, daring, and plainly beautiful voices to come out of recent fantasy. She’s a powerhouse with a wink in her eye and a song in each pocket.”—Catherynne M. Valente, New York Times-bestselling author of the Fairyland novels
“These stories are a pure joy. C. S. E. Cooney’s imagination is wild and varied, her stories bawdy, horrific, comic, and … horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time. Her characters are wickedly appealing, and her language—O! her language. Lush, playful, poetic, but never obscure or stilted, it makes her magic more magic, her comedy more comic, and her tragic moments almost unbearable.”
—Delia Sherman, author of Young Woman in a Garden: Stories
“Bone Swans is a joy of feathery bones & ghoulish clowns. I adored every word. Like an eyas cries for meat, I cry for more. C.S.E. Cooney’s a major talent and these are major talent stories. Who can resist hero rats, pouting swans, feral children, flying carpets and the Flabberghast? So tongue-tied am I with delight I fall back on the usual cliches: gripping, delightful, insightful, rollicking & lyrical—and yet not one cliche is to be found in Bone Swans, only stories of surpassing delicacy and wit, told by a lady of rare talent. Please, ma’am, might I have some more?”
—Ysabeau S. Wilce, Andre Norton Award wining author of Flora’s Dare
A swan princess hunted for her bones, a broken musician and his silver pipe, and a rat named Maurice bring justice to a town under fell enchantment. A gang of courageous kids confronts both a plague-destroyed world and an afterlife infested with clowns but robbed of laughter. In an island city, the murder of a child unites two lovers, but vengeance will part them. Only human sacrifice will save a city trapped in ice and darkness. Gold spun out of straw has a price, but not the one you expect.
World Fantasy Award winner Ellen Kushner has called Cooney’s writing “stunningly delicious! Cruel, beautiful and irresistible.” Bone Swans, the infernally whimsical debut collection from C. S. E. Cooney, gathers five novellas that in the words of Andre Norton Award winner Delia Sherman are “bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time.” Cooney’s mentor, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Gene Wolfe, proclaims in his introduction that her style is so original it can only be described as “pure Cooney,” and he offers readers a challenge: “Try to define that when you’ve finished the stories in this book.”
More praise for Bone Swans
If your familiarity begins and ends with C.S.E. Cooney’s poetry, do yourself a favor and stick around for these novellas. If you aren’t new to her stories, know that you will find her here at the top of her not inconsiderable game. Highly original, mythic in scope, lyrically told, just plain fun.
—Nicole Kornher-Stace, author of Archivist Wasp
C.S.E. Cooney’s Bone Swans is like visiting a literary Ys. Coaxed by her deft hand, lands and people long lost to memory resurface, breaking through the hearts of readers with the force of a gentle tsunami. Once that wave has broken over you, you are never the same.
—Tiffany Trent, author of The Unnaturalists
“Like one of her characters, C. S. E. Cooney is a master piper, playing songs within songs. Her stories are wild, theatrical, full of music and murder and magic.”
—James Enge, author of Blood of Ambrose
“filigree sentences. Then she adds a beaded fringe of colorful characters-the living, the dead, the wronged, the righteous, the villainous, the vengeful, the divine. It’s a treasure chest of a collection, and it’s full of gems.
—Sharon Shinn, author of the Elemental Blessings series
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LIFE ON THE SUN: I really liked the writing, the world building, the fantasy elements. The one thing I didn’t like was the romances, one seemingly only being there because no young-ish adult protagonist can be left single and the other… I’m just going to not post my complaint about that one because spoilers. I don’t mind romances when they’re necessary for the plot or when both characters are necessary for the plot and they’re perfect for each other, but in this story, the protagonist’s love interest could have been entirely cut from the story and nothing important would be lost.
THE BONE SWANS OF AMANDALE: This is a very well-written story, incorporating lots of cool fairy tale elements and characters. I really enjoyed it.
MARTYR’S GEM: Okay, this one I think is the weakest and it had some elements that annoyed me. First of all, there’s the part with a man-eating shark and killing it is considered a glorious admirable thing. We need to stop villainizing sharks, because first of all, they don’t want to hurt humans and only bite when they mistake us for seals, and second of all they’re being severely overfished and overhunted largely due to people villainizing them. So that irritated me. Second of all,there’s another out of nowhere gratuitous romance in this one, which as I mentioned before is a trope I don’t like. Third of all, as part of the culture in the fictional world this story takes place in, they make all women required to have lots of babies. For me, this kind of cultural feature instantly makes the world a dystopia, but it isn’t treated as such in the story. Granted having a culture that is focused on fertility is important to the story. It just bothers me that she’d put compulsory childbirth (childbirth being the most painful thing a person can experience) in a story and not acknowledge the horror of that. Like, if it was a man writing the story I could dismiss it as obliviousness, and if a woman from a time period or culture in which childbirth was compulsory had written it I could dismiss it as an alternate perception of normal. But the author of these stories is a woman in modern America, and her female characters are well developed and she puts female characters in positions of power fairly often. I guess I’m just kind of confused about where that artistic choice is coming from.
HOW THE MILKMAID STRUCK A BARGAIN WITH THE CROOKED ONE: A unique and creative interpretation of Rumpelstiltskin.
THE BIG BAH-HA: This one was really really well written. It takes place in a world where all the adults and teenagers have been killed by a particular disease and children fend for themselves until they’re about twelve and old enough to also die of the disease. Sort of like that one episode of Star Trek (please don’t ask me the name of it, I’m the most casual of Trekkies) except with much more fantasy elements. I really appreciated how she seemed to grasp child culture and children’s patterns of speech. It’s an extremely dark and disturbing story, so it probably won’t be to everyone’s taste. But it is definitely well written.