About halfway through. Began reading on a train traveling through the winter snow, an appropriately liminal place to start these border stories. Although I’d already read many of them, I’m finding that reading them together, in order, casts a different and a deeper spell. On a train, reading this book, it’s hard not to believe Bordertown and the Way to this city of magic must surely exist, somewhere just out of–just within–reach.
I remember looking up at one point, from the first/title story (ellen-kushner and t-windling‘s Welcome to Bordertown), which was all about figuring out which world one belongs in, to find myself a uncertain–just for an instant, as the train rolled on–which world I was in.
I kept reading while at Kindling Words, and finished on the plane back to Arizona, another appropriately in-between sort of place.
Bordertown has changed and it hasn’t, in the 13 years since the Way to the Border was last open. Because I have a story in this anthology, I can’t really be at all objective about it. But from the perspective of the late teen/early 20-something I was, who discovered War for the Oaks and Moonheart and went searching for more and more books about this new thing that fantasy could suddenly be, and who has been reading them ever since … the magic is still there.
(If any Tucsonans or people-who-pass-regularly-through-Tucson would like to borrow and return the ARC once lnhammer finished with it, let me know–only condition is, love it or hate it or have complex in-between feelings about it, you blog about the book someplace when you’re through.)