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RYO Review: Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
A collection of short stories that feature the weird and wonderful, mixing fantasy and magical realism with a touch of horror and the supernatural, Magic for Beginners is a good mix of humour and dread that at times made me regret my commute wasn’t longer (something that doesn’t happen very often at all).
From the turns of phrase to the worldbuilding, the stories in the book are at times, incredibly sad, very humorous, and full of a deep longing for normality. The stand outs for me, by far, were Stone Animals, Magic for Beginners and Lull, but I figure I could provide a few words about each. It’s not a long collection, and some stories are shorter than others, so it makes for some fairly quick reading.
WoGF Review: Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
Rhonda Knight is a frequent contributor to WWEnd through her many reviews and her excellent blog series Automata 101 and Outside the Norm. Ronda is an Associate Professor of English at Coker College in Hartsville, SC. She teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature as well as composition courses.
Are There Stranger Things than Stranger Things Happen?
When I read the review of Kelly Link‘s Stranger Things Happen (2001) on Salon.com, I was sure that I would love this collection of eleven short stories. According to the reviewer, Laura Miller, the stories are a mixture of modern horror and fantasy. Unfortunately, I was not as taken with this collection as Miller was. However, they are intriguing and clever.
Let’s start with intriguing. I keep bringing them up in conversation whenever I can. I want to tell people about the stories—sometimes to tell them about a clever idea, sometimes to share a sentence with them, and sometimes to complain about them. Even though the stories are clever, they are not all satisfying. Often a story can get by with shortcomings in character and plot just because it is so cleverly written. In my opinion, only a few of Link’s stories can get by on cleverness alone. The others left me frustrated or simply scratching my head.
