Peter Dickinson is an award-winning speculative fiction author, primarily for YAs and middle-grade readers. He lives in England, as it says in the bio at the back of the book, with his second wife. I only mention her because, well, his second wife is Robin McKinley. There really is a frightening amount of talent and brain-power in that house. He has recently turned eighty, and has published a collection of poems in honor of his birthday. In any case, The Lion Tamer’s Daughter, and Other Stories is a collection of four works — one short story, and three that I would consider novellas, ranging from 60 to 140 pages.

According to the blurb on the inside of the book, each of these stories is about the idea of a double or a twin in some way, shape or form. It’s true, obviously. The first story is about a boy who gains a twin through odd circumstances; the second is about an older man telling a ghost encounter from his youth; the third is about a young man captured by kidnappers who imagines a ghost — or does he? The last story, the one of the title and the longest story in the volume, is about a young man named Keith and his best friend Melly — and her doppelganger, who lives in Edinburgh.

Generally speaking, to balance yesterday’s ‘girl’ collection, this is a ‘boy’ collection. The author is male; the main characters are all male. In one of the stories, I don’t think there are really any female characters at all. That doesn’t mean I disliked the stories; quite the opposite, really. The male characters were all very personable; I thought that Mr. Dickinson did an exceptional job at crafting four very different narrators in these stories. (Three of which, by the way, appear to be original to the collection.) To balance it a little, I should mention that while the main character in the last story was male, Melly (the best friend) was possibly even more important than Keith (the narrator).

Most of the stories were closer to ghost stories than truly fantasy stories. The middle two stories really were ghost stories; the first of those two made no bones about it, and explained the ghostliness and its consequences rather well. In the last one, the doppelganger aspect was supernatural or paranormal, rather than ghostly, but it was quite well-constructed as well. The first story was too short to have any elements that I can discuss without giving too much away, so I’ll leave it there. I do rather like ghost stories, and they weren’t the frightening kind of ghost stories, generally speaking. They were more historical/contemporary stories with one ghostly element.

Overall, I felt that the strength of the stories was primarily the characters, who range from circus members to the heir to a restaurant fortune. Fans of character-driven books will definitely enjoy these tales more than those looking for whiz-bang action, although they certainly aren’t stagnant. I’m fairly certain that fans of Peter Dickinson’s other works would enjoy this book, but I’ve never read anything else he’s written, so I can’t guarantee it. (Yeah, I’ll fix that soon.) I also think that fans of other British fantasists such as Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper would like these stories. 4.5/5 stars.