Fantasy writer and illustrator Kathleen Jennings (Flyaway) offers 12 glittering, fantasy-inspired short stories in Kindling. In "Ella and the Flame," three women and one child tell each other stories to comfort themselves while their neighbors burn them alive as retribution for a mysterious crime. Flipping the fantasy script by placing a boggart rather than suspected witches at its center, "On Pepper Creek" tells the story of a boggart who is brought to a new land against his will in a family trunk and who exacts his revenge in return. And while the titular "Kindling" centers the unexpected intuition behind a barmaid's observations of her clientele, "Splendour Falls" shows the much more nefarious manipulations of a mysterious young woman who enchants a young man gifted with special sight.
Jennings's plots are refreshingly never straightforward, and her tone and subject matter never the same. For example, "Ella and the Flame" casts a wistful spell with its oral-storytelling conceit and angle of feminist tragedy. Meanwhile, "Undine Love" is a complex balancing act between a cautionary tale and dark humor, using its narrator's outside perspective to infuse humor in the plight of its doomed "hero." Though recognizable folk tales and fairy tales appear in fragments--"Sleeping Beauty" in "A Hedge of Yellow Roses"; "The Frog Prince" in "Undine Love"; "Rumpelstiltskin" in "Splendour Falls"--they never play out the way readers expect. Throughout, like the scraps of old tales, characters' motivations flicker in and out of view, making the true magic of these stories the simultaneous predictability and unknowability of the people and creatures at their centers. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor