Book Review: Pleased! A short story anthology in celebration of The Beatles' Please Please Me album's 60th anniversary

This was a cheap Kindle deal, so I took a punt. It's a collection of stories whose titles mirror the tracks of Please Please Me. Except... They kinda don't?

A couple of the stories are explicitly Beatle-y, the others aren't. The titles don't seem to bear any resemblance to the stories told. Indeed, one was obviously originally named "Octopus's Garden" - featuring a rather good tale of a man who dreams he's an octopus, and vice-versa - but has been shoved into the "There's A Place" slot.

There are a couple of stand-out stories. "Love Me Do" is a rather nice twist(!) on a classic pen-pal romance - the lovers leaving messages on their parents' graves. And "Do You Want To Know A Secret?" gives us a rather dark perspective on the Santa Clause Cinematic Universe.

The rest of the stories are basically fine. It's a rather random collection of stories and it might have been nice if they had some thematic consistency.