A couple of weeks ago, Abigail Nussbaum reviewed Theodora Goss’s debut collection, In The Forest of Forgetting, for Strange Horizons. I’d also just read the collection (and written a review, for Vector, which won’t appear until 2007), and we ended up having a discussion about our differing reactions to the book. Abigail’s now posted the conversation over at Asking The Wrong Questions. As she says, it’ll make more sense if you read her review first. And I’ve just realised that there is a bit about why I like one of Goss’s stories, “The Rose in Twelve Petals”, in my review of Feeling Very Strange:
What about “The Rose in Twelve Petals” (2002) by Theodora Goss? That’s a retelling of a fairy story—Sleeping Beauty, to be precise—and surely fairy stories, even twice-told ones, have to be considered traditional?
Here comes the Prince on a bulldozer. What did you expect? Things change in a hundred years. (p. 239)
Guess again. Goss’s tale is astonishing; it would be worth slogging and hacking through the overgrown bramble of every other reimagined fairytale out there to get to, but here it is served up on a plate. As the rose has twelve petals, the story has twelve parts, and though they start traditionally enough—a witch, a king, a queen, a princess—that doesn’t last. While the Beauty sleeps, time really passes. Things change. The transition to now is vertiginous, almost harrowing: we are forced to watch the old world thinning, and our modern world coming into being. These days we have to find our own ending, Goss is telling is; may we all be lucky enough to escape from our own pockets of time.
If you were wondering, I had a few reservations about the collection as a whole, but I think it’s very much worth reading.
Also, I can neither confirm nor deny that I fight crime.
vector-bsfa.com 
I picked up the chapbook version of A Rose in Twelve Petals with illustrations by Charles Vess awhile back and really enjoyed the story. I definitely want to pick up this Goss collection simply because of my enjoyment of that story.