Twisted Crows - Will Canduri - ★★.½

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AUTHOR: Will Canduri
TRANSLATOR: Andrea Labinger
ILLUSTRATOR: Megan Herzart
GENRE: Short Stories.
RATING: 2.4 stars.

In a Nutshell: I wanted this collection to work for me. But it just didn’t.


This short story collection contains 28 stories that are quite diverse from each other. They cover a variety of genres (crime, horror, dystopian, sci-fi, mystery…), periods (historical, contemporary, futuristic), lengths (with the shortest story being just a page long), and character perspectives (first, second and third person.) As such, the stories don’t feel repetitive.

This should have made the stories work well for me. But somehow, the writing style didn’t suit my taste. The plots were too meandering for my liking, with sometimes there being no logical connection between the start and the finish. At times, the ending was too abrupt. Many stories were quite conversation-dominated, a stylistic choice that never works for me.

The stories are supposedly “steeped in Spanish culture and tradition.” I might be too dense in this regard, given my lack of familiarity with all thing Spanish, so I could hardly make out anything cultural in the stories. The title seems to promise twists, and there are twists present in the end for many of the stories. But most of these were foreseeable and hence not surprising to me.

I think a part of me expected more darkness from this collection, partly because of the titular crows. The darkness is present only in bits and spurts.

That said, I must give the stories credit for being quite imaginative. Many of the premises were mind-blowingly creative. If only the implementation had worked better for me!

The stories have been translated from Spanish (the author is of Venezuelan origin), but nowhere could I detect a linguistic hurdle and the writing flowed smoothly. Kudos to the translator!

As always, I rated the stories individually. However, most of them ended up with a midway or lower rating. No story reached even the 4-star mark. As such, my overall experience was just average and I cannot pick any story as a memorable one. The closest to the top were ‘Crow Salad’ and ‘Two Rocking Chairs’, with 3.5 stars each.

Most readers seem to have enjoyed this collecting, so either I was the wrong reader for this, or I picked it up at the wrong time. So please go through the other reviews before you take a call on this book.

2.4 stars, based on the average of my ratings for each of the stories.

My thanks to BooksGoSocial and NetGalley for the DRC of “Twisted Crows: Spanish-Infused Short Stories”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.

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