There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book. This is such a fantastic concept! Some stories grabbed me more than others but overall I was impressed.

My review on my website: https://indiapoint.net/2018/04/22/book-review-reading-5x5-writers-edition/

To put a fine point on it, I requested Reading 5x5 purely out of curiosity as a writer. As a reader, my initial thought was "who on earth would want to read the same story five times? Then do it four times more?" I was interested in looking at the mechanics of how such a collaboration might come together. What would a brief look like?

Part way through the first story, I zipped to the end to skim the first brief. By the end of the second story, I found myself enjoying the stories and had mostly forgotten about the briefs! Eventually I found each group of five sufficiently varied that I had little send of reading the same story several times. All in all, a nicely rounded collection of short stories. The similarities are there for one who might want to dissect the briefs and analyze the writing.

Other than one story which felt forced, the rest were four and five stars shorts, rich in description and world and satisfying in spite of limits of their length. Recommended for anyone who enjoys SF and Fantasy short stories.

I received a copy from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

ARC Copy...it was interesting to see what different authors will write and which direction they will go when given the same "brief" to work from.

This anthology hooked me in with its premise: five genres and story briefs, with five authors writing each one. The genres included were contemporary fantasy, soft science fiction, other, hard science fiction, and high fantasy; all genres that I'm interested in. The book is set up so that all the stories, divided by genre, come first, and the briefs are all at the end. I loved reading the stories in one genre, playing detective to find the common elements between them, and then going to the end to see what the authors were working off of.

My favorite genre in this anthology was definitely the contemporary fantasy. I don't want to spoil too much, but the stories in that genre all with the apocalypse and the protagonist's struggle between preventing the apocalypse or leaving home and being free; basically, the brief was right up my alley. The different interpretations of the brief were really cool and a few of the endings definitely surprised me. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the hard science fiction stories, since I don't read a lot of hard science fiction and I was expecting for the stories to go over my head. They were all very accessible, though, and I loved the AI element in each story.

Overall, I thought there was a really good mix of stories in here. I thought it was fairly easy to find the similarities between the contemporary fantasy stories, since the setting was more limiting/specific than the others, but I had a slightly harder time with the other genres. Each author put their own spin on their brief and even stories within the same genre were wildly different. Just a sneak peek of some of the things in this anthology: Aliens! Egyptian noir! Blood mages! Werewolves! There was only one story I wasn't super into, but it still interested me enough to finish reading it.

Another plus was the diversity in the stories. I didn't really go into the book expecting a lot, but I was pleasantly surprised at the variety of characters represented!

Reading 5x5 is a solid anthology, and I'm definitely interested in checking out other works from the authors who contributed.