Overall, I love the concept behind this anthology, villains are interesting characters in their own right and reading short stories from their point of view was intriguing. At the end of each short story, the Booktuber has a section where they essentially talk a bit more about their prompt. The YA author would then use that prompt and create their villain’s short story. But, of course, there were others that I did like, such as some of the fairytale-inspired ones and some of the Greek Mythology-inspired stories.Īlso, just to offer some clarification, the Booktubers essentially ‘challenged’ the YA Authors and gave them a prompt to use. For a lot of these stories, by the time I got into them, the story was over. As I said, this is just a general issue with writing short stories – getting hooked in takes a while. That leads me into some of the other short stories: overall, they were lovely stories and I did enjoy this collection, however, for the large majority of these stories, I didn’t get hooked in right away. But, I think the biggest problem with short stories, in general, is that the author doesn’t have a lot of time to hook the reader in, and I think that’s the main reason why a lot of these short stories didn’t interest me and Shirley & Jim became one of my favourites because I had that contextual knowledge. I know a reasonable amount about Sherlock Holmes’ story to begin with so this story worked for me because I had a lot of background knowledge and context about Holmes’ and Moriarty’s story. Of course, I’m a sucker for anything Sherlock Holmes, so this short story was right up my alley. In many ways, you can think of this short story as the beginning of Holmes’ and Moriarty’s life-long rivalry. It’s about their first interaction and mainly about a specific conversation the two had together. In this short story, we have Sherlock/Shirley writing to her best friend Watson about Jim Moriarty. The prompt was by Sasha Alsberg who wanted Susan Dennard to write a short story about a young Moriarty. This is essentially a short story about Sherlock (Shirley) Holmes and (Jim) Moriarty. So, since there are a lot of short stories, I thought I’d talk about my favourite short story in the anthology, and that is Shirley & Jim by Susan Dennard (author of Truthwitch). Some of the Booktubers involved are: Jesse George Christine Riccio Benjamin Alderson Samantha Lane on Tomes), Whitney Atkinson and a bunch more! Some of the YA authors are Nicola Yoon, Adam Silvera, Renee Ahdieh, Marissa Meyer, Victoria Schwab, Susan Dennard and many more!

Some are villains we know very well like Medusa, Sherlock Holmes and of course, some fairytale villains are also included. As I said, this is a collection of short stories by YA authors in collaboration with 13 popular Booktubers where they wrote stories from the perspectives of villains.

Because You Love to Hate Me by Amerie