Neil Gaiman's short stories tend to be a mixed bag. Sometimes, you get stories that rival his full length novels in terms of creativity, depth, suspense, and mystery, stories that leave you staring at that last page for a while, wondering if you're meant to be feeling a sense of dread, amusement, or curiosity at the things left unsaid. Or perhaps you're hit with a mixture of all three.

Other times, you have stories that are just....there. They fill the pages, they have a plot and characters that stick around and have their fun, and by the end you just move on to a hopefully better story. Anthologies are like that sometimes, so I'm not holding it against this book. I wouldn't exactly recommend it to Gaiman fans, as they've surely already read these stories in either Fragile Things or Smoke and Mirrors. The clear objective of this book was to choose the stories with the most kid-pleasing potential and, for the most part, the selections are serviceable. Weird to see "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" here, since that's definitely for a more at least teenaged crowd, as it's focused on a more mature experience. But I wouldn't say there's any story completely off limits for kids in here.

Some standouts include "October in the Chair," "Chivalry," "The Price," and "The Sunbird." I'm wavering a bit on "Troll Bridge" and "Don't Ask Jack," the first I like more for its ending, and the second I wish could have been a bit longer so we get a little more terror out of this infernal little jack in the box.

"The Case of Four and Twenty Blackbirds" and "How to Sell the Ponti Bridge" were a bit tedious to me, so I sort of just sped through those, as well as "The Witch's Headstone," which is good, but is also a chapter in The Graveyard Book, which I've already read. 

"How to Talk to Girls at Parties" and "Instructions" were middle of the road, good enough for me to enjoy the brief time they were there, but not particularly standouts. The latter has the usual Gaiman dark whimsy as I like to call it.