Kelly Link has a way with words, and this collection is no different. Not every story worked perfectly for me, and that's ok. I still absolutely loved some of these stories and consider this a 5 star collection. There's something in here for everyone. Link's writing style is just so easy to latch onto and enjoy, and her characters felt relatable (cats or not). Great collection, and I'll continue to read everything she writes!

White Cat, Black Dog's stories feel like they came fully formed out of the same strange forest that released the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson and Oscar Wilde's weird fairy tales. Funny, strange and gorgeous beyond belief, this collection is a modern wonder I can't wait to share!

My first time to read from this author and actually I enjoyed the collection of the story. Never expected in terms of the theme because I thought its about animals. The combination of fantasy-literature in this book will capture your imagination and some little lessons about life.

Overall I enjoyed this book and will try to read her other books.


3.7/5 stars

Another great collection from Kelly Link. Her stories are always unique, interesting, and great to read. My favorites this time were The White Cat's Divorce and Skinder's Veil. Can't wait for more collection from Kelly Link. #WhiteCatBlackDog #NetGalley

Not to be too flippant, but this has big wtf did I just read energy. The stories are incredibly well written, but at no point did I have any clue what was going on. Also the description does not accurately explain how eerie and at times absolutely terrifying almost all of these stories are. None were outright horror, but I felt unsettled all the same. I think I’d like it more if I had more interest in non-traditional fantasy or horror, since it’s incredibly written, but because not I’m sticking with a three.

Thank you, Netgalley and Publisher, for this Arc!!!

Kelly Link is now right up there with my favorite authors. This was a masterpiece in storytelling. A retelling of seven grimdark fairytales that kept me completely spellbound.

I love the cats. I love the connection I felt throughout all these stories. I loved the imagery, the dark and beautiful pictures this author painted. I loved everything! I literally have zero complaints. This was brilliant, and I know I'm going to be thinking back on these tales.

I cannot recommend this enough!

Out March 28, 2023!

A decent collection. As usual with short story collections there were a few I loved, and some that I found to be just so-so. All easily readable though. A strange retelling of some well known fairytales. Pretty much exactly what I expected from Kelly Link.

3.8 Stars
One Liner: An interesting collection of weird fairytale retellings (may not work for everyone)

The title of the original fairytale is mentioned with the story’s title. However, I don’t remember most of these and decided not to look them up. This allowed me to read each story as a standalone piece rather than a retelling. I feel this enhanced my reading experience for most stories.
The plots of most stories reveal gradually and ease the reader into the settings. While all of them are not atmospheric, some sure make an impact. Even the characters are diverse, and a few of them are quite unlikeable. Yet, the package delivers satisfactory results.
I rate the stories individually, so here it goes:

The White Cat's Divorce: An aging billionaire sends his three sons on a wild goose chase, promising them to name an heir. This one starts with a light, sarcastic touch and grows into a heartwarming tale (with some action and drama thrown into the mix). It is creative, cute in certain places, and ends up as a satisfying read. 4.5 stars

Prince Hat Underground: What does Gary do when his long-time partner and husband, the enigmatic Prince Hat, walks away? It’s the journey of a man into the otherworld, intent on getting his love back. Will he succeed? This story is long and detailed. I love the changing settings and Gary’s varying emotions. 4.5 stars

The White Road: Umm… this is the story of a man from a traveling company and his recollections of how the white road has taken over regions. The narration starts with a little rambling but establishes the narrator’s voice and character arc. The plot is a little too vague to understand the setting. It seems like a mix of dystopian and historical. I’d have liked it more if there was some additional information about the inhabitants of the white road. The atmosphere was spot-on, though. 3 stars

The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear: A professor returning home from an official trip is stranded at an airport hotel for days. She needs to go home to her wife and little kid and be there in time for an appointment. Her mental health issues make the trip much hard, and the return journey has something in store for her. I have mixed feeling about this one. It kind of deals with some issues, but the ending doesn’t offer much. I’m left wondering what the purpose of the story is. 2.5 stars

The Game of Smash and Recovery: A brother cares for his little sister and brings her up in the absence of their parents. They live with the Handmaids and vampires. Soon it’s time for the sister to complete the game and find out the truth. I knew the original but had a hard time relating it with the retellings. However, this one is imaginative and creative, even when I felt detached and bored most of the time. This is probably the weakest story in the collection (for me). 2 stars

The Lady and the Fox: Miranda is eleven when she sees a stranger outside the Honeywell home on a Christmas night. She is intrigued by his jacket and the embroidery of a trapped fox. Years fly by, and Christmas becomes synonymous with the stranger for Miranda. Where does this lead her? This is a heartwarming story in the typical fairytale style. While it doesn’t provide answers to certain questions, it ends on a positive note. I like Miranda’s arc the best. 4 stars

Skinder's Veil: Andy needs to complete his dissertation but is finding it hard to focus when his friend offers him a chance to be a home-sitter in the middle of a remote place. This comes with rules, which Andy discovers only after he goes there. However, learns a lot more that helps in the most unexpected ways. This one takes time to settle but is an intriguing and complex story. It reads as if someone half-bored with life has written it. However, the reason for this style reveals itself towards the end. Another favorite story in the collection. I know the original tale, though I think, I’m more likely to remember this weird retelling. 4.5 stars

To summarize, White Cat, Black Dog is an entertaining collection of stories, which, IMHO, should be read as standalone and not retellings. Pick it up if you like strange stories.
Thank you, NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Random House, for the eARC. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.
#NetGalley #WhiteCatBlackDog

"Seven ingeniously reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the modern world, from one of today's finest short story writers - MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellow Kelly Link, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble.

Featuring illustrations by award-winning artist Shaun Tan.

Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers - characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.

In "The White Cat's Divorce," an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which child will become his heir. In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In "Skinder's Veil," a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers - or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.

Twisting and turning in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable - these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the realm of short fiction."

I'm not the biggest fan of short fiction, but Kelly Link is always an exception to any rule.

These stories were everything I hoped and more! Amazing.. This will be a book club pick for my book club to discuss in April because we have been waiting a unique story collection.

Like any collection, there are hits and misses. I won't enumerate the misses, but will instead focus on some of the hits. Fantasy not being one of my go-to's, I admit to a certain reluctance to the genre, but these witty, and in some cases, haunting modernized fairy tales held me. Kelly Link's ability to weave atmospheric spells overrode my basic pragmatic attitude, and made me curious to read others she has written.

It's been quite sometime since I read a collection of Kelly Link's stories and picking up White Cat, Black Dog was like settling in with a weird and wonderful old friend. My favorites were Skinder's Veil, The Lady and the Fox, and The White Road.

White Cat Black Dog is an enjoyable puzzle box of stories where Kelly Link turns her dizzying imagination to the world of familiar fairy tales. As I've always found with Link, the strength of these stories lies in how they manage to combine truly bizarre elements with every day, relatable problems. Naturally, fairy tales which are famous for bringing magic and curses to themes as universal as growing up and dealing with families are a good fit for this writer. I enjoyed the way the ghosts of these tales stuck with me, and I kept finding myself thinking and wondering about these stories and the images inside for days after I finished them.

These stories are wildly imaginative, yet they remain plotted stories and never veer off to the realm of prose poem. Link's pieces do tend to unfold slowly and make the reader work to figure them out. In some of her tales I'm left wondering if I indeed caught everything or if there is something left hidden on the page that I managed to miss.

Even the stories that have near hallucinatory qualities retain a grounded core that helps keep them relatable. "Skinder's Veil" may deal with doppelgangers, animal guests, and Death personified, but it also has a main character who desperately needs to meet a deadline for work but who also struggles with procrastination and the paralysis that can envelope us all when faced with an important task. "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear" which follows a lady trapped by flight cancellations is suddenly even more timely in light of the recent travel nightmares faced by air travelers. That sense of loss of control in a travel situation is something I think will resonate with most people and I found it grounded the more fantastical elements of the story very well and added to its success. I will admit that while I was suspecting the ultimate twist fairly early in the story, I was a bit slow to catch on to the fact that this world seemed to be <spoiler> populated entirely by women. </spoiler>

"The Lady and the Fox" was a piece that worked very well for me, though it did not have as many obscure layers and unanswerable questions as the other stories. I thought the characters seemed much more sharply drawn and the relationship between Miranda and Michael was very believable and pointedly real which allowed the fantastic elements to shine more in what I found to be the most grounded story in the collection. I also enjoyed that the rich and powerful Elspeth was actually allowed to have a personality beyond "wealthy woman." She really did get some great lines there at the end!

I did find myself wishing that some of the stories reflected the fairy tales they were working with a bit more. One of the things that most excited me about this collection was the idea of old stories told by way of Kelly Link and I would have appreciated seeing a few more of those elements developed more explicitly. While "Skinder's Veil" and "The White Road" are two of my favorites from the collection, I had really hoped to find a few more familiar elements from traditional tales reflected in them.

I think this is a collection that rewards readers who enjoy working at stories to uncover their layers and twists and who can appreciate the off the wall and bizarre.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for an advance e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

eries Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got a copy of this as an ebook through Netgalley to review.

Thoughts: Like any anthology of short stories there were some hits and some misses here. In general I would say there were more hits than misses. The stories span across fantasy/sci-fi/horror genres and many are blends of these.

The stories that were my favorites were "The White Cat's Divorce", "The White Road", "The Game of Smash and Recovery", and "Skinder's Veil". The only story that was a miss for me was "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear". You can see a very brief synopsis and my thoughts on each story below.

- The White Cat's Divorce (5/5 stars)
I really loved this story about a youngest son who finds a magical cat who helps him respond to the challenges his rich father sets for him and his brothers. This is a very ironic story that I found hugely entertaining.

- Prince Hat Underground (4/5 stars)
This was about a man who has to chase down his husband when he disappears with a strange woman. This was well done and a fun read but nothing super exciting.

- The White Road (5/5 stars)
This one was very creative and I enjoyed it. It's set in a post-apocalyptic world where a dead body must be present or the creatures of the white road will find you. We follow a group of travelers who travel up and down the coast providing various services to towns. This was eerie and intriguing and creepy, I really loved it.

- The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear (3/5 stars)
I wasn't a huge fan of this one. It's about a woman who is trying to return home to her wife and daughter after a business trip and she keeps getting delayed. She has a mysterious and important deadline at home she can't miss. I wasn't completely clear on what is going on at the end of this one but I have a guess. It was just a bit rambling hard to follow and ambiguous.

- The Game of Smash and Recovery (5/5 stars)
This one I really loved. It was about a girl Anat and her brother Oscar who have been left on some sort of deserted planet by their parents. Oscar tries to take care of Anat, however as Anat gets older she starts to discover things around the planet and finds that neither her nor their brother is what she was led to believe. I really loved the setting, the characters, the mystery, and the unexpected conclusion to the story.

- The Lady and the Fox (4/5 stars)
This is a cute and cozy retelling of Tam-Lin. It features a young girl who is a yearly Christmas guest at a wealthy family's house after her mother is sent to prison. Every Christmas she sees a ghostly man outside of the window and eventually she confronts him. It was a warm and cozy Christmas story of sorts (I mean with curses and ghosts but still cozy).

- Skinder's Veil (5/5 stars)
This story is about a post-doc student who is struggling with his thesis. One of his friends asks him to come out and house sit a remote cottage in the woods; he thinks this just might be what he needs to finally get his thesis written. However, his friend didn't tell him ahead of about the strange uninvited guests he would have to accommodate and she definitely forgot to tell him about Skinder himself. As she explains all of this upon his arrival, we realize this post-doc is in for a crazy week. I loved the characters here and the mystery around Skinder. This was incredibly intriguing and ironic and I loved it.

My Summary (4/5): Overall this was a solid short story collection and I enjoyed it a lot. I always enjoy Link's short stories and this collection was one of her best ones yet. The wonderful Shaun Tan drawings at the beginning of each story were a wonderful addition and made this even more enjoyable to read. Highly recommend to short story fans and fantasy/horror fans.

I received this book of stories as an Advanced Reader's Copy from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review. When I saw that Kelly Link had a book up available through them I snapped it up immediately because I really wanted to know what she was going to come up with next, and I think this book did not disappoint.

This is a collection of stories based on fairy tales unlike any I have read before. Not sure they are technically fairy tales themselves since I don't think these are the kind of stories that people would normally tell to young children. Dark and adult things happen in these tales involving sex and death and existential dread, so content may pose a problem for people expecting traditional fairy tales. One might say that this returns the roots of fairy tales more towards the original oral tradition but I'm still not convinced that that's exactly what the author was going for here. There's also a lot of magical realism going on here things like talking animals and mysterious commands and strange prohibitions, straight out of regular fantasy. Some of the stories are set in places that are recognizably not our own place and time, while others are in a place pretty similar to our world but with only a slight difference surrounding the main character. I would say that most of the time the main character was a fairly unremarkable person, maybe a little bit more perceptive or a little more accepting than some when it comes to uncanny experiences, but there are some cases where the protagonist definitely has something special about them that may be the source of the strangeness of the story. Much of the time the people and other beings they run into are extraordinary. There are also the background characters, members of a wealthy eccentric family, for instance, a grad school roommate, or fairly ordinary co-workers, who people these stories and lends a charming sense of familiarity at the same time the weirdness is going on.

I've read and really liked some of the author's earlier collections. And I've read work by writers whom she influenced personally. This book is another one of those works that was produced under a MacArthur Genius fellowship which does seem to free up the writer from worrying and pull out all the stops in these ambitious adventures. The resulting stories all felt like they had something fresh and intriguing about them.

The subtitles on these stories point to the source material that served in some way as an inspiration to the ones presented here. I don't think you need to be completely familiar with the source material to enjoy these. I mean there probably is, on some level, a kind of dialogue with the original material, but if you can't completely remember what The Brothers Grimm or Charles Perreault did with a particular fable I think you're not missing the entire point of any of these stories.

Some people don't like stories where you read some bizarre work and you are just left wondering afterwards what did I just read? I think they feel like they're being pranked or something. I like the loose form of these stories where you didn't know whether the action would suddenly stop and lead you on to the next story, or whether something truly horrifying or completely baffling would happen out of nowhere. So for me the stories which don't completely tell you what their intentions are or how far they're they're willing to raise the stakes are a lot of fun and I really appreciate them. If I were to become a short story writer I think that's what I would try to do myself, in fact.

I think maybe I’m not the best audience for these reimagined fairy tales. I enjoyed their quirkiness and creepiness on an intellectual level but there was nothing surprising or emotionally resonant about them. If I were to dig a little deeper I would say that these stories didn’t end in a meaningful way. Fairy tales generally have something to say about the state of the world or the human condition and our flaws, foibles but these stories just kind of end, like a set up without a payoff. Even my favorite of the stories, Skinder’s Veil, ends on a curious note not an emotionally satisfying one. There is no authentic hero’s journey, the characters don’t grow or change, they don’t learn. So it all feels like a hollow experience.

This is Bulgakov meets the Stinky Cheese Man. I was happy to get an ARC of this one, and it came out hot right out of the gate. Link’s writing is irreverent but topical, simultaneously nostalgic and contemporaneous cultural critique. “The White Cat’s Divorce” and “Prince Hat Underground” were clear standouts for me. These two stories do a particularly good job of bringing together the comforting traditional stock plot and moralism of a fairy tale with modern-era references like the talking cats running the weed farm in Colorado or the New York gay couple getting sucked into the underworld. The rest of the collection didn’t quite pack the same punch, but those first two stories are ones I’ll revisit again and again.

I am definitely already biased; I adore the stories of Kelly Link and have read previous short story collections (Magic For Beginners, Get in Trouble) and I'd already read one of the stories in this collection (Skinder's Veil) -- the dark humor of these stories, the cutting reality set against unreality, the way these stories are set up-- I love it. At the heart of it, people are wanderers, or, in the case of they think they know what they want, things don't always pan out that way, or they want things they can't truly have-- these stories are moving and thought-provoking and thank you so much to the publisher for the DRC (I wished for) and to have that wish granted just made my day.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Random House Publishing Group- Random House for an advance copy of this collection of short stories based on tales and myths from long ago.

There are reasons why stories and tales resound through the ages as enjoyable and as meaningful as they told around campfires or fireplaces years ago. The characters might have changed with the ages, along with settings and some of the plot. However human motivations and emotions have not changed much, and though the titles might have changed, kings to billionaires, princess to influencers the story's core still have meaning. The madness of the powerful, the love between two people, even cats working in greenhouses and making very potent strains of marijuana. Kelly Link in her collection White Cat, Black Dog has used these fables to build short stories that speak to readers about this modern world, with all the magic and myth of the past.

The book consists of seven tales told in varying length which draw on particularly fables, rhymes, folk tales and more as a basis to build the stories on. Link kindly puts in the work that she is using as a muse under the title of her work, but readers shouldn't expect a direct retelling. Instead Link takes the story to different levels, and different places, changing and adding where needed, but keeping the basic idea. The first story The White Cat's Divorce, is one of my favorites, dealing with a powerful father, who dreams of death, and not wanting his three children around sends them on quests to find the perfect dog, the perfect suit, and the perfect wife. This one involves dogs in walnuts, hydroponic farms, and cats getting into high jinks. Another is a Hansel and Gretel story, told in a science fictional setting. Each story is unique in it's own way.

A very different collection of short stories, and one that I really enjoyed. Most of these kind of collections from the same writer or even various writers always have a few stories that I wonder why were included. This collection does not. Each one is so different even with the fable as basis for the story, the stories just seem fresh and different. Readers can tell that it is from one writer, but each story has its own style, own pace. Some seem just fantastic and the characters go with it, others know that something odd is happening and it reflects in what the characters do. One is science fiction in presentation. However all are well written, and keep the reader going. I'm not sure how Link plotted these out, but each word is in the story for a reason, and nothing seems extraneous or even missing. A really exciting collection.

Recommended for people who like their fiction with a few twists, and no idea where the story is going. Link is known for her short stories, something I must admit I have been quite remiss on reading, but I know I will have to change that.

Kelly Link hits it out of the park with these charming and engaging stories. I loved getting lost in the world of talking cats, suburbian hellscapes, monsters and creatures of many worlds. One story didn't land with me, the futuristic space ship story. The rest were all wonderful. I really loved how she played with the sense of 'play' in this, with games being a core feature of many stories, but they all have something to offer.