I'll go through this story by story. It'll be the easiest considering I set it aside so long.
"A Universe of Wishes:" The titular story was one of the best. A boy who harvests wishes from dead bodies, where the energy to make wishes is stored. He needs "a universe of wishes" to wish his parents back to life. This one's a cute, somewhat sad and wistful story. I like the relationship between the two male leads.
"The Silk Blade:" A girl in a competition to become the consort of the ruler falls for another female competitor. This one made me want an entire book about this world. Definitely my favorite so far.
"The Scarlet Woman:" This is a Gemma Doyle story. I have all those books and haven't read but a few chapters of the first, so I didn't read this. I need to remember it's here once I actually do get to those books,
"Cristal Y Ceniza:" Glass and Ash. Cinderella-themed. A girl from a small country heads to the palace to try to persuade the rulers to help her people escape from the anti-gay laws that would separate her mothers, amongst others. The prince she befriends is trans male. I enjoyed this one a lot.
"Liberia:" Now we leap to the sci-fi. This one is a male scientist who is travelling to the colonies in space. He has plants with him that carry the voices and memories of his family, but a disaster causes him to risk losing them all and he has to fight to keep what he can. I liked this but sci-fi never resonates with me much.
"A Royal Affair:" A story linked to the author's series. A man's relationship with the prince is ended by his abusive brother. I'm sure this one is better if you know the characters. It was decent.
"The Takeback Tango:" Back to sci-fi but I liked this one a lot more. A "Robin Hood"-type female character wants to steal back her homeworld's artifacts from the Museum of the Conquered and meets a boy along the way.
"Dream and Dare:" Beauty and the Beast, only the Beast is a runaway tomboyish princess. This one is cute.
"Wish:" Sci-fi genie helps a sick girl who is stuck as the only teen on Venus because she's too sick to return to Earth like the rest of the kids her age. Cute.
"The Weight:" Weird story about couples having their hearts removed and weighed to learn their hearts' true story. Ambivalent ending. My least favorite so far.
"Unmoor:" An Unmoor is someone who can take memories from you. It's a paid service likely often used by those with a broken heart. Main male character wants to forget his ex-boyfriend and the results are bittersweet. Pretty good. I like it more than the previous story but it's my second least fave so far.
"The Coldest Spot in the Universe:" Time flip between a girl in a post-apocalyptic, dying world and the alien girl studying that now-ancient civilization possibly almost a thousand years later if they're using the same year count. This one is quite poignant. I loved it.
"The Beginning of Monsters:" More sci-fi. This one's got a significantly different world. People can do body augmentation so well that it passes on genetically. A girl was born with retractable crystal claws that help her design these bodies. She's currently designing a body for "one of eleven small kings of the nameless crater city." The king is currently female but is tired of being a woman. The king's offspring is referred to by an entirely new pronoun "an." This was jarring at first because it seemed like a typo. It's just written right into the text without explanation so it took a bit of reading to realize it was meant as a pronoun. Choosing a word like "an" that actually is already an English word might not have been the best choice. You're doing a sci-fi story. Invent a word. And now having finished the story, I can say how frustrating it was. I really liked the two main characters but this level of world-building needs a novel. At the short story level, it simply does not work. I don't understand the structure of their society, what any of these "force" things they keep referencing are, what the four genders they mention are (he, she, an and az), or much of anything really. This is a great example of a good idea meant for a novel that turned into a short story with shitty world-building.
"Longer Than the Threads of Time:" A take on Rapunzel. A Dominican witch with fire-starting powers is placed in an invisible tower of Belvedere Castle in Central Park in the late 1940s. It's meant to keep others safe from her powers and was done with the aid of her mother. Decades later, a young brujo can see the tower, though he was warned against ever approaching it, and they get into a Rapunzel-style romance. During a bit of love talk, he offers to take her place and that's what frees her. She vows to return for him, though first it's time for a family reunion.
"Habibi:" This one was sad. It's letters magically exchanged between two prisoners. One is a young black boy and the other is a young Muslim boy in Gaza. My issue with it is that because it's letters, it's written in two different fonts and my eyes struggled with both. They describe their lives and the Muslim boy is partaking in a hunger strike, while the black boy vows to get out, find him and save him.
This was a good anthology overall. Some of the more sci-fi stories lost me a bit but they always will. It's worth reading.
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