Seasons of Glass and Iron Anthology Review

Over the last two decades, Amal El-Mohtar has written many short stories and poems, pieces that are always ethereal, breathtaking, profound. For the first time, El-Mohtar’s corpus has been assembled into her own anthology. The This Is How You Lose the Time War co-author, looking back on her career in the book’s intro, says that the primary throughline she sees is her love of writing about women and their relationships with one another. None of the book’s content is brand new, making the primary original craft at play here how the writing is ordered. It opens big with the titular entry, El-Mohtar’s magnum opus in the world of short fiction.

“Seasons of Glass and Iron” is about the fateful encounter between Tabitha and Amira, two young women trapped by very specific fairy-tale punishments. Both Tabitha and Amira believe their circumstances are their fault, but the other sees it as ludicrous that they would think of their “once upon a time” in that way (in both cases, the melancholy interlude that explains the backstory ends abruptly with the other’s reaction).