The lovely Melissa Ann Singer talks about the women in Of Sorrow and Such here.
I often complain about how rare it is to have a book, TV show, or film be driven by relationships between women. Stories seem to me to be primarily driven by relationships between men or between men and women. Often there’s only one woman in the story in the first place, or, if there’s more than one, they never meet. When relationships between women are seen, they are often framed in the context of each woman’s relationship to a man who knows them both (for instance, a wife and her mother-in-law); or the women are portrayed competitors.
To me, that doesn’t reflect the real world, where my relationships with women are as varied and complex as the women I know. Sometimes people say I’m reading the “wrong kind” of books, that there’s plenty of what I want in women’s fiction. While that’s true to a degree—I read women’s fiction too—I love category fiction. SF/F, horror/UF, mystery/suspense/thriller are my go-tos. And if there’s room in those stories for all kinds of male relationships, there’s room for all kinds of female relationships too.
Which is part of why Of Sorrow and Such by Angela Slatter made me so happy. In this slim volume of fantasy there are a wealth of women’s relationships, which both spoke to me and propelled the story.