I'm a huge McKinley fan; however, this is not quite her best work. She's better with the novel-length features where she has the chance to develop the world and storyline in a way that keeps the reader hooked. The clipped nature of these stories are just too short for the things she's capable of creating.

6 stories from married authors RM & PD. Plus a prologue. I liked all the stories, which had a fairy tale type cadence to them. The last story I liked the least & it was the one that had a Damar reference.
It took me a while to get through that one.

An interesting collection of short stories that verge on novellas. If you like longer short stories, this is a good place to look.

From the girl unwilling to follow in her grandfather's footsteps to the curse-breaking lovers, the book had a theme of redemption. That theme kept some of the stories from getting too dark and dragging the book into the realm of emo teenagers. For most of the stories, there is a balance between the unpleasant realities of the world we live in and a chance at a brighter future. It feels like the darkness makes the spark all the brighter.

Curiously uneven. Dickinson and McKinley are both guilty of very weak stories (the endless and heavy-handed "Sea Serpent" and the pointless and vaguely silly "The Sea-King's Son"), but also manage to produce excellent tales (the dark "Mermaid's Song" and the far-worldly "Water Horse"). They would have been better-served by an editor not involved in their marriage, I think. By rights, I should give this collection three-and-half stars, but it ends with a wonderful story in my beloved Damar ("A Pool in the Desert"; Dickinson's third tale, "Kraken," is also quite good), so I am therefore glad to own the collection.

downloaded from my public library, this was a very excellent anthology, only one of the stories did not please me, I just didn't get it at all, but every other one I absolutely loved.

"I believe there is no other place like it in all the wide world, though there must be other places just as strange. It is our strangeness to be a threshold between land and water; and the boundary between us is striven for, and fought over, and it shifts sometimes this way, and sometimes that."

Mermaids, krakens, and water horses, oh my! A really cool collection of stories based on an element rather than any specific creature.

"The Kraken" and "A Pool in the Desert" (bringing us back to Damar! yay!) are both fantastic. The best two stories in the whole set.

I always get confused about what's an anthology and what's not; I'm never sure whether I should expect a collection of stories BY the people on the front cover or merely collected by and edited by them. In this case, for whatever reason, I was expecting water-themed stories simply collected by Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson, though I did expect they'd include at least one of their own. I was tickled when the very first story was by them, and then thrilled when it turned out the rest of the stories were too! I haven't read much of Peter Dickinson, and I'm pretty sure I've read almost all of Robin McKinley, so I heard her voice most strongly in the stories, but otherwise, I think they make a very strong husband-and-wife story writing team. The stories, with the exception of one I had trouble following and getting into ("Sea Serpent") were well-told and engrossing. I spent a very happy afternoon reading this book.

01/2013 I must confess that I only read the stories by McKinley in this anthology. Peter Dickinson has just never clicked for me.

I quite enjoy all McKinley's stories, although A Pool in the Desert has never seemed like a story particularly suited to an anthology about water.

11/2017 And once again, I only read McKinley's stories. This time it struck me that the stories Water Horse and A Pool in the Desert are about girls in abusive situations, and something extraordinary must happen to free them. It's sad.

This is more like a 3 1/2. I've never read any Peter Dickinson before, but they were still good stories though I didn't like them as much as McKinley's. Definitely a different style from Robin McKinley, but good in their own way. The problem with short stories is that they always end too soon for me.

I've only read "a pool in the desert". Wonderful short sweet story, I read it all in less than an hour. The writing is definitely the best of Robin, without the long, boring and mostly useless digressions of her longer books. I love her characters, it's really easy for me to fit into them and travel with them around her worlds.

This book should maybe be attached to the Damar set, since the characters lives in that world.

what i don't really understand is the title. I doesn't fit really well into the story, it's more like she tryed to attach this story to the "sleeping beauty" story, but they don't really have a lot of things in common (sleep apart).

A collection of short stories about creatures of the deep. I didn't realize until just before writing this review, however, that the authors are husband and wife--pretty cool. Each contributes three stories, and overall I think I liked Dickinson's better. If I had to rate just the McKinley pieces, I'd probably just give it two stars. Sea Serpent and Kraken were my two favorite stories. I liked it well enough that I'll probably read the next one in the series, which has a theme of fire.

I thought it was interesting that none of the main characters (except one) came from a function family. Sad, but I guess it fits the "fairy tale" genre.

-Mermaid Song: Loved the ending, but had a heartbreaking middle.

-The Sea-King's Son: Enjoyed some of the elements of the story, but a little gushier than I like.

-Sea Serpent: Perhaps my favorite story of the compilation. Scary monsters, adventure, magic... this one had it all.

-Water Horse: My favorite of McKinley's--interesting ideas of the guardians and how their magic works.

-Kraken: Good story, archetypal facing of the unknown. It worked out in the end a little better than I would have expected, but I was expecting more Lovecraft and less Disney.

-A Pool in the Desert: This was just weird. Sucky home life for the main character who has crazy parents, enough that I can understand her desire to leave. But I didn't really get why she formed such an attachment for where she was headed (nothing particularly good there for her) and the pacing in the last two pages was so much faster than earlier that it threw me off. McKinley's total shift of momentum left me feeling slightly confused and unhappy about the ending. She should have just cut out one or two paragraphs, or fleshed them out to a few pages worth.

Rating: PG-13, for some mild sexuality.

I would have easily given this five stars if it was all Robin McKinley, whose voice and style is well developed and smooth. The stories of her husband, Peter Dickinson, were not as well written with an awkward voice that only appears worse when it comes after a beautifully written McKinley piece. A sweet idea, husband and wife duo, but it does neither of them justice.