Review of A Yuletide Tail by dema1020
3 June 2024
This review contains spoilers
Hmm. A Yuletide Tail: Part One is one half of a story, and thus mostly focused on the narrative point of view of a cat witnessing some horrific events and being chased around a bit.
It is certainly creative in its writing style and there are some cool ideas that could be paid off in part two, but as it stands, it's just okay. Hard to follow, not really worth following to begin with, and so far, part of a problem I'm beginning to experience with this Short Trips anthology compared to my first run with Quality of Leadership. The Christmas Treasury has more than double the amount of stories when compared to Quality of Leadership even though they are about the same page length. That makes each of the Short Trips in the 11th Anthology feel a lot less substantive.
I get this blends with the holiday theme a little bit, but I have a long way to go with this one, and am already kind of getting sick of it.
Yuletide Tale's second part doesn't really work the way I would prefer. The doctor comes by with Ace to a theme park of Disckensworld, sneezes on a soldier, and saves the planet in doing so. They then feed our cat narrator, and leave. That's the story.
It's cute but heavily disappointing. Dickensworld is barely explored or explained across the two story parts. Our cat being the perspective of narration makes this story difficult and clunky. Very unfortunate on the whole and one of the weaker points in the Christmas Treasury, in my opinion.