Book Report: Seasons of Glass and Iron
By: Cassie Birk
Edited By: Carly Zimmerman
Check out our report to see if you fit our reader profile for Amal El-Mohtar’s upcoming collection, Seasons of Glass and Iron.
BEFORE WE DIVE IN…
Pub Day: March 24th, 2026
Genre: The writing in this collection spans a wide breadth of genres. While fantasy driven titles make up the bulk of the stories, that includes the full spectrum from folkloric fantasy to magical realism. The collection also includes poetry in both English and Arabic and science fiction.
Age Group: While geared towards adult readers, young adults would enjoy the collection as well.
Content warnings for the following described on page: Biphobia, Dysphoria, Lesphobia
Spice Level: Mild. While there are scenes of lust, they are more ethereal and dream-like than explicit.
Page Count: 208 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK
This is a collection of 18 stories and poems written generally from 2008-2023. This includes some of her award winning pieces. The titular story, “Seasons of Glass and Iron,” for example, won the Hugo Award, Locus Award, and Nebula Award for best short story of 2016. The pieces showcase the variety of genres that Amal writes.
There is a strong amount of folkloric fantasy, like a tale of a woman cursed to wear iron shoes meeting a woman forced to stay on a glass hill in “Seasons of Glass and Iron.” Another follows a story of a man seeking a witch’s help healing the hole in his back in “John Hollowback and the Witch,” which nicely follows her most recent novella, The River Has Roots.
The collection also features magical realism stories, like a woman whose pockets keep filling with strange objects in “Pockets,” a young girl finding comfort in a new country through her relationship with an owl at the zoo in “The Truth About Owls,” and poetry showcasing haunting imagery with “Qahr” and “Pisces.”
READER PROFILE
You might find this book a great fit for your TBR if:
You are drawn to stories that read like ancient fables but give lessons for the modern day, like Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings, A Girl Goes into the Forest by Peg Alford Pursell, and A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
Amongst all the 500- and 700-page bricks coming out, you are looking for something short and you enjoy novellas and small short story collections that still explore deep themes like identity and longing, like Girl & Flame by Melissa Reddish, The Invisible Knight by Italo Calvino, and Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera
You are hoping to add more diverse speculative fiction to your TBR and are drawn to unapologetically representative collections like Trans-Galactic Bike Ride edited by Elly Blue, Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu, and Fables and Spells by Adrienne Maree Brown
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo Credit: Ainslie Coghill
Many people, including myself, first got introduced to Amal El-Motar’s writing through This is How You Lose the Time War, the novella she co-wrote with Max Gladstone. That novella won the 2019 Nebula Award for Best Novella, the 2020 Locus Award for Best Novella, the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella, amongst other awards. But Amal has been in the speculative fiction space for much longer than the last few years. She has published work since 2006, originally on her site Goblin Fruit and has been contributing to magazines including Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Mythic Delirium as well as anthologies including The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales and Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories. She also reviews sci-fi and fantasy books, most impressively with The New York Times. She lives in Canada, and her work often reflects her experiences of being of Lebanese descent in the west.
WHAT READERS THINK
“Overall, I think this is a wonderful journey, whether you sit and devour them one after another or chip away at them over time. And even though I didn't love all of them, I did enjoy most—whether by marveling at it, taking something from it, appreciating it, or just simply having a good time with it…”—h o l l i s via GoodReads
“A collection of short stories that are great to be read all at once or story by story. I will say, not all the stories were my cup of tea. There definitely were stories that I would have loved to have been a full-length book while others I almost wanted to skip. Even with that, I enjoyed the collection. The center of all the [stories are] women, even if only a brief part of [the] story. The inclusion of their wins, their losses, and their actualization of themselves really kept me interested.”—kwoz1008 via StoryGraph
“El-Mohtar has a life long fan in me and any book that she comes out with, I will read. So I was incredibly excited when I got my hands on this one—short story collections can be hit or miss but I found myself loving this all the way through. This was heartwarming with a creative twist on the traditional fairytale that had some important and relevant commentary. This has El-Mohtar's signature prose and style, it's not for everyone but it is 110% for me.”—Jessie D. via NetGalley
BOOK REPORTER’S REVIEW
Collections are something I like to look at on two fronts: the quality of each piece and whether every piece coalesces to give me a theme or message to reflect on when I look at the book as a whole. While some pieces were a bit weaker to me on an individual level, apologies to “And Their Lips Rang With the Sun” and “Pisces,” Amal’s lyrical writing style makes the blend between poetry and prose across pieces in multiple genres written across fifteen years absolutely seamless.
I loved The River Has Roots, so it was great to be exposed to more of Amal’s folklore inspired tales. While most of these stories were previously published in magazines and anthologies, they were new to me. One of the surprising standouts to me was “A Hollow Play”; poly lesbians, an avian drag queen, and epistolary longing? Extraordinary!
The book centers on womanhood in all of its facets; women's wrongs, fears, love for each other, and how they can find each other and themselves in this world and the next. In the Preface, Amal points this out herself, “Mostly, what emerged is that I love women. I love women talking to each other. I love women reading each other, through letters and journals and flowers, offering up the stories of themselves to each other's tender scrutiny. I love women being friends and being lovers, in all of their shapes, across the breadth and depth of their lives.” It was that unabashed feminine throughline, full of love and passion, that sucked me back into Seasons of Glass and Iron, even in the stories that didn’t wow me.
I’m excited for these gems to reach new readers who, like me, hadn’t read these pieces before, and will look forward to seeing what new tales Amal has for us in the future.
Thank you to NetGalley and the Tordotcom team for providing an advanced digital copy for this report!