I felt predisposed to like Urban Folk Tales by Y Rodriguez (picked up recently from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme). It sounded like the kind of piece that would be up my street; interesting characters in a landscape layered with brick and concrete but with old magic creeping through. Sadly, that’s not what I found. Instead, I discovered a small collection of rather long and apparently unrelated stories, populated by characters I failed to warm to. After not finding a foothold in the first few pages I admit that I covered the rest at some pace but I came home disappointed.

As I pondered my exploration of this fictionalised version of the author’s New York, I tried to pin down what left me discontent. I settled on the term “over-described”. Everything is in sharp focus. Many characters are given their full names and perhaps a nick name too. Tiny details are spelled out in detail. For example, from the first page of the first story: “David took the money and placed it securely inside his vest pocket, almost ripped off from its seam from age and use. It reminded him to buy a needle and spool of thread.” Had I accidentally picked up the author’s notes rather than the finished stories.

For a folk tale, I want less detail. Like a photographer, keep my eye on the subject I’m meant to be following with a narrow depth of field and let the rest soften into glorious bokeh. For a suite of tales, I’d like links between them so that re-reading hints a a deeper mythos than seemed the case first time through. Show me less and stretch my imagination more.

Possibly Urban Folk Tales did all those things and I just missed it but my experience of the work was just another set of stories but not, I’m afraid, ones I expect to haunt me.