Synopsis:
Join three time-traveling, universe-hopping, interdimensional storytellers as they share stories of life, death, love, and despair in Jamal Barbari’s debut short story collection, Shades of Mortality. Each story features a unique illustration by one of 9 different artists and draws the reader into a mixture of profound, touching, and comic tales unlike any you’ve ever read.
Favorite Lines:
Because this is a collection of short stories, rather than picking favorite lines, I wanted to highlight my favorite stories out of the collection: Golu, the God of Luck and Nothing but Ink. Be sure to check them out!
My Opinion:
I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest opinion.
Shades of Mortality serves as a fantastic debut novel for Barbari. This is a collection of short-stories told from a trio of time-traveling, universe-hopping storytellers. The stories explore themes of love, despair, life, death, and much more. Each story is accompanied by utterly unique illustrations that only serve to enhance the readers’ experience.
I found this to be an extremely clever and refreshing collection of stories. Barbari masterfully creates colorful tales that have the ability to play on a variety of readers’ emotions. With compelling character writing and vividly painted landscapes, I found myself immersed wholeheartedly in each story that Barbari introduced. I am especially in awe of Barbari’s ability to hope from genre to genre so seamlessly – one story might feature heartache and tragedy while another might be light-hearted and joyful. I can assure you that your interest will remain piqued because you won’t know what you are going to get next!
If I had to nitpick one thing it would be that the sometimes it almost felt like there was too much background for some of the stories which led to some minor pacing issues on occasion. Despite this, Shades of Mortality was still an interesting and impressive collection.
Summary:
Overall, I really enjoyed this collection of stories. The cover is a pretty good indication of what readers will be getting themselves into which is, a little bit of everything! If you like short story collections that feature a variety of genres, themes, and emotions then this book could be for you. Happy reading!