Note: Upon discovering that the author used AI to assist in the writing of some of these stories, we were concerned about publishing this review. Although AI is a fascinating technology, as it is currently constructed it does not compensate the authors on whose work it is based. But given the fact that the author acknowledges the use of AI as an assist, and how that use may have factored into the quality of these stories according to our reviewer (plus the time Lucy took to read and review it), we have decided to go ahead and publish the review, with this notice to our readers.
Genre: Fantasy
LGBTQ+ Category: Ace, Gay, Lesbian
Reviewer: Lucy
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About The Book
Fairy Tales and Shadows introduces a world of magic and splendor through a diverse set of characters who each star in their own fairy tale-style stories. As the book progresses the stories and characters begin to overlap and come together transforming the book from a collection of fairy tales to a plot-driven novel. Each story presents morals, much like classic fairy tales. The difference is that these morals have been modernized. Instead of teaching children not to wander through wolf-infested woods at night, Fairy Tales and Shadows promotes ideas such as, love comes in all shapes and sizes. Throughout the book, the magic system and geography of the world are illuminated as the heroes learn from their tribulations. Eventually, the values of each character and their relationship with the world culminate to set the stage for the final conflict.
The Review
Fairy Tales and Shadows by Phillip Donnelly is a series of short stories that have a common magical theme. Each tale ends with a list of the morals contained within the story, such as “love comes in all sizes” and “Don’t go out of your way to make other people’s lives harder.”
I’ve always enjoyed collections of short stories as they give me the opportunity to get to know an author’s style without the full-commitment of a long story. The idea of modern-themed fairy tales was intriguing, but what I found in Fairy Tales and Shadows were simple stories written in a traditional manner. It was really the moral of the story that had been given a modern twist. It took me back to Aesop’s Fables and some of the other stories of my childhood.
Another modern twist of this collection of stories was the use of AI. The book begins with an author’s note that Artificial Intelligence was used to ‘speed up the writing process and to sidestep writer’s block.’ The author acknowledges the use of AI in writing some, but not all, of the content of this collection. As such, the work has to be viewed as a collaboration between the human writer and OpenAI’s chat bot.
There are several aspects of the story that could be a result of the use of AI. Throughout the stories, there is a lack of dialogue. Characters are described as interacting, but there are no conversations. So, any ideas or thoughts or feelings are supposition on the part of the reader or just given to us by the author. We don’t get to experience those through the characters’ conversations. It literally takes away the characters’ ‘voice’ so we don’t get the multi-dimensionality that’s so important to understanding a character.
In many of the stories, we never learn the characters’ names. We read about ‘the old man’, ‘the boy’, ‘the vampire’, ‘the child’, etc. It makes it difficult to get invested in the characters if they aren’t named.
Throughout the collection, writing style relied heavily on description, and yet the word choices were very simplistic and repetitive. In a few places, the word choices weren’t exactly wrong but were odd for that particular passage. This was yet another aspect of the storytelling that may have been impacted by the use of AI.
These stories are short so there isn’t much time investment involved in reading each one. The morals at that follow each tale are intriguingly odd. It was a little like reading the fortune cookie at the end of your meal: they were either brilliantly on point or lacked a complete understanding of English semantics.
At the end of this collection, I was underwhelmed by the stories. I experienced a bit of nostalgia for these types of tales from my childhood, but the lack of dialogue and the simplicity of the language did not leave me with a favorable impression of Fairy Tales and Shadows by Phillip Donnelly.
The Reviewer
I’m an avid reader who loves pretty much all genres except math textbooks. As a kid, my parents exposed me to everything from fairies, hobbits, and dragons to the biographies of interesting people around the world, interspersed with poetry, plays, and music. Into adulthood, I spent a lot of years with my nose buried in various textbooks. Now, I read whatever grabs my fancy.