Dr Stephen Carver: This is a wonderfully rich and diverse collection by the ever versatile Forester, who’s probably best known for his poetry. As a fiction debut, this is impressive work, with eye for startling detail and the quick wit and emotional depth that fans of the epic Dragonsong will instantly recognise as the author’s signature style. The language is confident and lush, as one would expect from a poet telling stories, and Forester’s theme are universal. First love, loss, regret, faith, art, ambition, desire and death are all explored in genuinely original ways, with unique voices and widely different genres, ranging from science fiction, magic realism and gothic horror to urban realism and good, old fashioned humour. There’s a fairy tale motif running through several stories, most notably ‘The Goblin Child’ itself, which showcases Forester’s ability to blend the discourses of the real and the fantastic through the mind of his protagonist. It’s difficult to pick a favourite, but stand-out stories for me are ‘Vile Body,’ which is wonderfully mad and genuinely disturbing, the modern tragedy of ‘Samphire,’ and the jewel of the collection, the bitter-sweet love story ‘Circling the Moon.’ I live on short story collections, and this one is a genuine treat. Based on this work, we can only hope there’s a novel in the pipeline.
Dr Janet Pasqual:
Creative, expressive, and imaginative writing, interweaving stories of varying themes and subjects - scary stories, romance, family, bureaucracy, comedy, regret, etc., where each story can have the capacity to bring the readers into a different world, into a different dimension each time a new story begins – from the allusions and symbolism of The Birthday to the fantasy in the Goblin, the naturalism in Served Cold, a touch of romanticism in Circling the Moon and more.
Being an incurable romantic, I particularly was caught on Circling the Moon which reveals not only the author’s eloquence but more so, his intensity and passion in weaving his stories - so intense, it makes me think he is more than Eliot himself - caught likewise on the line - ‘passed through the unknown, remembered gate, when the last of earth left to discover is that which was at the beginning’ – worth pondering.

The Goblin Child is a book in which everyone can find a story to own, for when the story has been written, it is not anymore the author’s but for the reader to own.

Surely, this book can be highly recommended, a must read for the young ones and the young once alike
Jacqueline Haskell: This is an amazing and unusual collection of stories - with equally amazing illustrations for many of them, where the illustration adds to our understanding of the story itself. Several are adult takes on fairy tales we might have known as a child, and others quite chilling tales of unreliable narrators, obsessed protagonists, and love's labours lost! The whole here is definitely greater than the sum of the parts and unlike some short story collections, which I had just dipped into, I read this from cover to cover. I guarantee you will want to read more of this author - he combines page turning plots with delightful, often poetic, prose.