"This, Other World" reminded me first of the poem "Jabberwocky." There's a lot of words thrown in to enhance the sci-fi feel that don't actually have meaning in our world, but you can figure out their general function through context. It was interesting to try to unpack all the worldbuilding Tidhar does over the course of the brief story. Sita's decision at the end and Brahma's contact with the characters were neat twists on the epic.
Perhaps because I was reading "Fragments from the Book of Beauty" late at night with some goofy friends, I thought this one was unintentionally hilarious. One friend read the first section aloud to all of us and we couldn't stop laughing. The vocabulary is just over the top, and the descriptions of the world in this tale are ridiculous. There's also more Jabberwocky words invented and thrown in. Annnd then it takes a weird turn when Mandodari is entreating Sita to give in to Ravana.
"Kalyug Amended" was cool as an updated version of Sita and her sons' story. Sita's a divorced mother, and the custody battle for her twins ends up in her favor, because in now women have more power than in the world of the epic. The last two stories in this section I don't have much to say about, other than that "Petrichor" was interesting for the backstory on Sita's origins.
Hanuman finds Sita
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