MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS

My knowledge of Kelly Link's work was very limited going into last year. I'd been reading praises for her first story collection, Stranger Things Happen, for quite a while but just hadn't gotten around to buying it. I came across her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 (the New Wave Fabulists issue) and her story "Catskin" in McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thirlling Tales. I enjoyed the first but wasn't that excited about the second. Then Gordon Van Gelder published the title story to her second story collection in F&SF last year and I knew I had to start getting her work. Read and enjoyed STH a few months back and then received Magic for Beginners for Christmas; I made it my first book of 2006.

I wanted to write a very cogent review, assessing Link's strengths as a storyteller and as a writer. Instead, I just think...wow wow wow. Her stories deal with real life and the fanstastic in the same manner, as if it is all real (and who's to say it's not?). Are the fantasy parts an allegory for real life or is real like the allegory? The stories are stuffed with witty lines ("Life, like red hair or blue eyes, is a recessive gene" from "The Great Divorce") and humorous asides ("Imaginary houses are sexy. Real houses are work." from "Lull." The subjects range from zombies ("The Hortlak" and "Some Zombie Contingency Plans") to crumbling marriages ("The Great Divorce" and "Stone Animals," to name two) to a cannon ("The Cannon," which is also written in a very entertaining question-and-answer format). Then there is the title story, which after only two reads has become one of my favorite stories ever; it has the wonderful concept of a pirate TV show called "The Library" and a teenage boy who may or may not be saving one of the characters on that show. Of course, it's so much more than that.

I think Kelly Link is brilliant and I know I haven't done her any kind of justice with this short review. If you take anything from my rambling, take this - you need to read her work. Now.