![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thistlechaser
2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide, by various authors
2016 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide, by various authors
2017 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide, by various authors
2018 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide, by various authors
All four books are scifi anthologies, aimed at younger readers, with main characters who are "traditionally under-represented in science fiction" (girls, people of color, disabled people).
Each book had at least 20 stories, and probably 98% of those stories had female main characters. A few of them were also people of color. Just a very small percent were disabled. Of those that had a disabled main character, most were "disabled" because they were born on another planet and couldn't live well with earth's gravity. (This isn't a complaint, just pointing it out.)
I started with the 2018 book, and wow. I've had such trouble with anthology books in the past -- I rarely find more than one or two stories worth reading in them. In this one, there were a bunch of outstanding stories, and most of the rest were very good. Of the 20, I didn't finish two, and maybe two more I wish I hadn't finished.
Since this book series seemed to care about the quality of the stories in it, I got the 2017, 2016, and 2015 versions of the books.
The 2017 one had a couple good stories, only one outstanding one, and I DNFed a number of stories in it.
The 2016 one had no outstanding stories, one or two good ones, and I DNFed a bunch of them.
The 2015 one was... not good. I don't think there was a single story I enjoyed in it, and I DNFed a bunch.
With other anthologies, I could find an online list of stories in the book, then I could find and mention the ones I really liked or disliked. Unfortunately that wasn't the case for these books, so I'm having a harder time remembering which ones I had really liked in that first book.
One interesting thing though: Some of the authors had a story in each of the books. The author who wrote the one I liked most in the 2018 book did one in the 2016 and 2015 ones as well, but I hadn't liked them at all. I found that happening again and again: Even if I loved an author's story in the 2018 book, their stories in the earlier books didn't work for me. I guess they grew as writers over those four years.
