Review of Suzanne J. Willis, “Sowing Rubies for Brides (Or the Graveyard at the Edge of Faeryland),” Luna Station Quarterly 23 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
There was a lot of world-building stuffed into this story; so much so, I almost didn’t see the story itself at times. The story itself is rather gruesome, laced with misogyny, full of murder and the hunting of faery brides. At the end of the massacre of the faeries that happened when Tirra was just a girl, an agreement was made between the human world and the faery world “for faery brides to be reborn from dead fae” and this agreement “had been the only chance at mending the wounds between this world and Faeryland” — but the piece that I was missing is why would Faeryland ever want to mend those wounds that had been inflicted upon them, unprompted and premeditated? If I were a faery and this had happened to my people, I would have had nothing to do with humans ever again: A man’s loneliness is never an excuse to kill someone.
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