This book is filled with tricky tales of all sorts, and of course Coyote comes into them, too, which is right and proper, as he puts it. In fact, the very first story has his sister trying to fix the world. Always a dangerous business when Old Woman Coyote tries to fix a young man's world, for the young man that is, because if he doesn't heed the teaching, he'll be mighty uncomfortable for a long time.

Of course some of Coyote's friends and family aren't out to trick you just to teach you a lesson, they may want to do bad things to you and than you have to be the tricky one if you want to get away. The young girls in the Irish school learn that about Queen Mab of the faery in the story "Friday Night At St. Cecilia's" by Ellen Klages. That story made Coyote a little nervous, but he liked the trick at the end the young girl did to save herself and her friend.

Coyote and me, we had a good time that afternoon sipping out tea — he slurps his if you want to know the truth — with him listening to me reading stories about tricky people from Africa, Asia, Europe and South America. I had forgotten how big Coyote's family was and how many friends the tricky guy has. By the time he decided it was time to go home, he wasn't feeling sorry for himself no more and was laughing under his breath as he trotted along down the road.

Any thing that can make Coyote stop feeling sorry for himself is a good thing, I thought as I sat and watched the sun go under the ground at the end of the road, and the stories in The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales that Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have picked out are good stories for that.

I picked up Coyote's mug, our pot of tea, and carefully put the book under my arm to remember to take it inside. Tricky stories like those ones can't be left just lying around; you just never know what they might get up to.