If I had to pick a quote that encapsulates the essence of all the stories contained in this Compendium, it would be this one:
“Once upon a time on the far side of yesterday, in a land that never was, in a time that could never be, there lived girls who chose their own fate…”
It’s poetic, fairy tale-like in its phrasing, and sharp in its messaging. But above all, it describes the book’s theme so accurately, because the stories in The Sourdough Compendium are all about women that chose their fates.
Some are victims, some are perpetrators, and some are simply hit by the consequences of their own dumb decisions, but none of the main character girls sits down to wait for things to change through an external actor. They all take the bull by the horns, even when it means illegally or immorally taking the law into their own hands. Angela Slatter likes her women to spread all over the moral spectrum: saints, sinners, and most often ambiguous, which takes me to my second favourite quote to describe female characters in this collection, from the author’s Notes:
. . . her moral compass hasn’t worked in a while.
The Sourdough Compendium is a reprinted anthology of anthologies. It contains three collections of short stories—“The Bitterwood Bible & Other Recountings,” “Sourdough & Other Stories,” and “The Tallow-Wife & Other Tales”—some of which are fairy tale retellings whose source tale is easily recognisable, but most of which are original stories by Slatter that drink so deeply from folkloric wells that they could pass for new traditional fairy tales. They share a common world, the Sourdough Universe, which comprises five full novels (not included here) and the 41 short stories of the anthologies. It’s an impressive amount of world-building, rich and detailed enough that it deserves its own planet, like Tolkien’s or Martin’s works. I’d even say this is Slatter’s own Middle-earth.
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