Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Jane Yolen

It seems like most everyone knows Jane Yolen for a book I've never gotten around to reading: The Devil's Arithmetic. I've been reading her since I was age appropriate for what she writes, but I always focused on her Pit Dragons series which I absolutely adored in my dragon-obsessed youth. However, even that doesn't really do her justice. Yolen has written dozens and dozens of kids, middle-reader, and teen books. I actually had no idea just how prolific she was until I did a little poking around in preparation for this post.

Twelve Impossible Things is a collection of her short stories - twelve of them. They are all at least decent, and several of them I like quite a bit. Yolen is a master of capturing a narrative voice. While they are all typically Yolen, each story has a strong and distinct narrative voice that ranges in age, nationality, and regionality. All the stories are fantasy based and have a good mix of themes a protagonist types.

Particularly, I liked:

• "Sea Dragon of Fife" - which is a story with the feel of a Scottish fish tale. It's set in a sort of fantasy version of Scotland and revolves around a fishing family who have just suffered the loss of two of their boys to a sea dragon attack. What I love about this was the voice and easy use of fishing terminology; I really felt like I was dunked right into a scottish seaside village.
• "Mama Gone" - a vampire story. It really feels like some authors are trying to reclaim vampires as figures of horror and good on them, vampires are supposed to be scary. This story isn't as scary as it is intensely sad. The story is told from the point of view of the pre-adolescent Mandy-Jane who must care for her siblings and father after her mother dies. It's a vaguely frontier setting with a vaguely folk tale type feel.
• "The Bridge's Complaint" - I love this one for it's narrator. This entire story is a version of the "Billy Goats Gruff" told from the point of view of the bridge.
• "Winter's King" -  another melancholy story that plays with levels of reality and the idea of Faery. This story has a more distant narrator who tells about a boy snatched from death as a newborn and as a result never really belongs to the human world. It's an interesting take on the idea of a changeling.

All the stories were worth reading and appropriate
for readers middle school and up, but I liked the introduction wherein Yolen talks about writing and what it means to be an adult who still plays in imaginative landscapes. It spoke to me as a writer.