Starred review from September 8, 2008
Readers as yet unfamiliar with Link (Magic for Beginners
) will be excited to discover her singular voice in this collection of nine short stories, her first book for young adults. The first entry, “The Wrong Grave,” immediately demonstrates her rare talents: a deadpan narration that conceals the author's metafictional sleight-of-hand (“Miles had always been impulsive. I think you should know that right up front”); subjects that range from absurd to mundane, all observed with equidistant irony. Miles, hoping to recover the poems he's buried with his dead girlfriend, digs up what appears to be the wrong corpse (“It's a mistake anyone could make,” interjects the narrator), who regains life and visits her mother, a lapsed Buddhist (“Mrs. Baldwin had taken her Buddhism very seriously, once, before substitute teaching had knocked it out of her'). Other stories have more overtly magical or intertextual themes; in each, Link's peppering of her prose with random associations dislocates readers from the ordinary. With a quirky, fairytale style evocative of Neil Gaiman, the author mingles the grotesque and the ethereal to make magic on the page. Ages 12–up.
October 1, 2008
Gr 9 Up-In her first collection of stories for young adults, Link upends traditional horror, science fiction, and fantasy motifs, creating original, quirky, and distinctly beautiful literary landscapes. Honed, brilliant language renders blood, werewolves, ghosts, magic, and monsters sublimeat times even funny. Readers will relish uncertainty in these savory, strange stories and never feel quite sure of their footing. They proceed giddily, jumping from one uncanny premise, phrase, or image to the next, eventually stumbling upon a revelation that hits them like the snap of a rubber band. Clever resolutions and tricky plots place teens on delightfully circuitous reading paths. Unexpected endings force them to double back and reconsider each story from the beginning. In this second read, young adults might notice Link's seamless incorporation of their own experiences. Awkward adolescence, uncomfortable first love, frustrating parents, and complicated friendships surface quietly amid wonderfully knotty, twisted plots and incandescent imagery. This compilation of intricate, transfixing selections succeeds in making the weird wonderful and the grotesque absolutely gorgeous."Shelley Huntington, New York Public Library"
Copyright 2008 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from September 15, 2008
Link, who has two breathlessly received books of strange, surrealistic tales for adults under her belt, makes the leap into the YA fold with this collection of short stories (most previously published in separate anthologies) that tug at the seams of reality, sometimes gently, sometimes violently. In nearly every one of these startlingly, sometimes confoundingly original stories, Link defies expectations with suchterrific turnarounds that you are left precipitously wondering not only Whats going to happen now? but also Wait, what just happened? Her conception of fantasy is so unique that when she uses words like ghost or magic, they mean something very different than they do anywhere else. Perhaps most surprisinglyand memorably is Links dedicated deadpan delivery that drives home how funny she can be, no matter how darkthe materialgets. After gobbling up a group of campers, a monster with a self-proclaimed sense of humor bargains with the terrified lone survivor, How about if I only eat you if you say the number that Im thinking of? I promise I wont cheat. I probably wont cheat. Shaun Tan contributes a handful of small illustrations that are, of course, just plain delightful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)
January 1, 2009
This book includes nine vividly wrought short stories (all but one previously published). Each features characters wrestling with issues of recognition--of a dead girlfriend, a goddess, a wizard. The most provocative ask readers who the monsters really are in genre-busting takes on the campfire tale, romance, and werewolf myth. Tan's black-and-white chapter opener illustrations help set the eerie mood.
(Copyright 2009 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)