Beautiful Sorrows is a short story collection from Mercedes M. Yardley.
There is a place where sorrows pile up like snow and rest in your hair like cherry blossoms. Boys have wings, monsters fall in love, women fade into nothingness, and the bones of small children snap like twigs. Darkness will surely devour you—but it will be exquisitely lovely while doing so.
Mercedes M. Yardley’s Beautiful Sorrows is an ephemeral collection encompassing twenty-seven short tales full of devastation, death, longing, and the shining ribbon of hope that binds them all together.
Beautiful Sorrows is a collection of short stories and flash fiction from Mercedes Yardley. The stories in Beautiful Sorrows are the kind of short stories that capture moments in people's lives. They aren't the kind of stories that contain an unfolding plot, they are more like moments plucked out of time.
Beautiful Sorrows is carried by Yardley's writing. This is the first book I've read by Yardley, and her writing has a quality I really love.
I have to admit I almost dnf'ed Beautiful Sorrows. I try my best to avoid books with child abuse, and the first two stories had too much for me. After marking it on Goodreads, it dawned on me I was reading an anthology. I decided to skip ahead in the collection and give it another try. I'm glad that I did.
Overall, I enjoyed Beautiful Sorrows. I don't think I have a single friend on Goodreads that gave it less than five stars. The writing was beautiful, and there was so much imagination to the stories. If I could have one wish right now it would be a middle grade dark fantasy written by Mercedes Yardley. The fact that this isn't getting a higher rating from me is purely subjective. I don't feel like I require plot in my short stories, but over the length of an entire book I probably do.
6/10: Good Read
