So what’s a bad girl? In this collection, everything from a true siren to some like, duh, sorority sisters who find that even sorority ‘Greeks’ have their harpies and avenging furies. Some, like the siren, are true bad girls by choice, others aren’t really bad girls at all other than in other people’s minds and still others aren’t as thoroughly bad girl as they like to appear.

There are twenty stories in Hags, Sirens, and Other Bad Girls of Fantasy, and I’m having an unusually hard time picking out favorites to flag, simply because there are so many excellent ones and I enjoyed almost all of them so much. But if I had to pick - "Bitter Fruit" by one of the ‘name’ authors, Rosemary Edghill, really stood out as an atmospheric and chilling play on the royal sacrifice on the tree theme. Phaedra Weldon’s "The Light of Ra" is a nice offbeat riff on the Egyptian mythology of Isis and Osiris and Set. Greg Beatty reminds us that even monsters have mothers who love them, while Peter Orullian’s character sketch of a very believable Lilith is one of the best of the not as bad as they seem stories. I also really liked Christina York’s twist on the Cinderella theme, Lisa Silverthorne’s harpy with a heart, and Michael Hiebert’s tribute to a real life child whose baby teeth came out a bit early thanks to her brother.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable collection of stories that will not only entertain you, but also make you think and feel. And maybe lead you to take another look at some of the "bad girls" you know in real life and how they got to be that way. Recommended.