A perfect book for people in a reading slump looking to discover a new author or folks new to paranormal / romantasy looking to dip their toe into a few approaches to the genre at once, through fairytale retellings that will give you a sense of of each author’s style through a relatively familiar story.
That said, these are necessarily diminished stories. Epics and fantasy stories are typically not only long, but much longer than your average book. This is because they require a lot more space to build out a world, explain how people interact with one another, and so on. You add to that needing to introduce two characters, get the reader to care about them, get them to care about each other, and form a believable, permanent bond… That is asking A LOT from a short story. I imagine this is why they went with well known fairy tales, since they require so much less set up, but for me, the stories on the whole were still more misses than hits.
For some, it was a matter of my preferences clearly not lining up with the author’s style, but even where it did, the characters mostly felt flat, the plots inconsequential, and resolutions contrived and unearned. There is a beauty and the beast retelling where our beast is a mythical creature trapped in the human world following a war and who is deeply lonely, so he sends out for a mail order bride of sorts, and then proceeds to treat her coldly and suspiciously. Why the hell did you order her then? There’s another where there is so much worldbuilding you know nearly nothing about any of the characters by the end.
It didn’t feel like the authors putting their best foot forward is what I’m getting at.
There are a couple stories that I think if you’re a fan of erotica will give you a good sense of whether you’d like something else by that author, and a couple that intrigued me enough to see if they have anything full length at my local library, which for a compilation is pretty much as good as it gets.