Reviews - Riverside Public Library

Booklist Reviews

Link, well known to fantasy fans and others who enjoy the weird in fiction, has gathered nine stories bound to captivate a broad audience. Humor, outrageous concepts, and first-class world building make these stories unforgettable. In "Light," a woman who lives on the Florida Keys drinks constantly, picks up men who are big trouble, and has two shadows and a cozy life until her twin brother slides a doppelgänger into her bed during a lulu of a hurricane. The narrator of "The Summer People" has troubles of a different kind when her moonshine-loving father leaves her alone, tending to the weird people in the weird house, who always protect their own. Link's locations are almost in our world or time, but not exactly. The 15-year-old narrator of "Secret Identity" has come to New York to rendezvous with an older guy she met on an MMORPG; she has to overcome a raft of misconceptions; she and "Paul Zell" never quite manage to see each other; and she suffers a long list of hilarious humiliations—trés pathétique. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

BookPage Reviews

Stories from behind the veil

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, February 2015

Kelly Link tends to inspire a range of comparisons to other authors—usually, some blend of Angela Carter and Haruki Murakami—but, in fact, nobody writes stories like hers. Link's fantastical worlds feel utterly real, partly because they're intensely matter-of-fact. Her characters are sassy, moody and cool, and they never, ever make any big deal out of the fact that there are monsters, aliens, vampires or ghosts hanging around, or that they might stumble into a pocket universe or some alternate dimension. Mostly they're concerned with cute guys and flirting and drinks, plus occasionally needing to save the world.

If that sounds light, it's not meant to. Link, who has written three previous short-story collections and co-edited several anthologies with her husband, Gavin J. Grant, is often hilarious, but her stories still break your heart. The best thing to compare her writing to might be "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," with its perfect combo of dark wit, sex and tragedy. Get in Trouble contains nine stories, which include maybe two happy endings, maybe zero, depending on how you look at them. She's never been one to wrap things up in tidy fashion.

The tales here range from fairy tales to space opera. Sometimes you're halfway through before you even know what kind of world you're in, but that's OK, because Link guides you so carefully that you'd follow her anywhere. There's an amateur cyberstalker at a superhero convention who, naturally, gets more than she bargained for ("Secret Identity"). There's a girl whose job as a caretaker of summer houses is not what it seems ("The Summer People"), a rich far-future playboy who falls for the wrong person ("Valley of the Girls"), a woman driven to distraction by her shadow ("Light").

As different as these stories are, they all in some way play with expectations. There are surprises on every page. Nothing is what it seems; everything is much more. In short, Kelly Link is magic.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Reviews

Book clubs: A tender homecoming

In his poignant, often funny memoir, Bettyville, George Hodgman, a gay writer and editor who once worked at Vanity Fair, tells the story of returning to his Midwestern hometown to live with his obstinate, elderly mother. Unemployed and tired of his solitary existence in New York City, Hodgman goes back to tiny Paris, Missouri (population 1,246), and takes up duties as caregiver to 90-year-old Betty, who can't be persuaded to move to an assisted-living facility. As he watches his mother decline, Hodgman takes stock of the past. His parents could never stomach his sexuality, and he grew up with feelings of inadequacy. Driven to compensate, he attained high-profile positions in the publishing world, but he also abused drugs and partied hard. For Hodgman, the return home represents a chance to make peace with the past. His portrait of Betty and his depictions of their life together are rendered with humor and tenderness. This is a beautifully written, timely memoir that will resonate with a wide range of readers.

FANTASTICAL WORLDS
It's been 10 years since Kelly Link released a collection of stories aimed at an adult audience. With Get in Trouble, she returns at the top of her form, offering nine transportive pieces of fiction that display her prodigious imaginative gifts. "The Summer People" is a haunting, atmospheric tale of a girl in small-town North Carolina who takes care of vacation homes, including a strange residence with otherworldly occupants. In "The New Boyfriend," a pampered teen's slumber party gets thrown off course when she receives an odd birthday gift: a very lifelike Ghost Boyfriend. "I Can See Right Through You" features a has-been actor who visits his former lover in the swamps of Florida, where she's filming a reality TV show about ghosts. Inspired by fairy tales and comic books, classic and contemporary myths, Link blends the surreal and the real to create narratives that are unforgettable—and unsettling. This is a rewarding book from one of the finest short-story writers working today.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS
A finalist for the National Book Award in fiction, Hanya Yanagihara's second novel, A Little Life, is a masterfully crafted epic about the nature of ambition and the quest for contentment in modern-day America. At the story's center are four buddies who move to New York City after college to kick off their careers. There's Willem, an up-and-coming actor, good-hearted and good-looking; J.B., an enterprising painter from Brooklyn; Malcolm, a restless architect; and Jude, an introverted lawyer whose nightmarish past is key to the narrative. Yanagihara traces the men's lives over the course of three decades, dramatizing the twists and turns of their careers, their personal histories and complex relationships with compassion and a remarkable sense of intimacy. The four friends and their richly detailed experiences stay with the reader long after the novel's stirring finish.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kirkus Reviews

In stories as haunting as anything the Grimm brothers could have come up with, Link (Magic for Beginners, 2005, etc.) gooses the mundane with meaning and enchantment borrowed from myth, urban legend and genre fiction. Here are superheroes who, like minor characters from reality shows, attend conferences at the same hotels as dentists and hold auditions for sidekicks. Here, a Ouija board can tell you as much about your future as your guidance counselor. In "Two Houses," six astronauts wake from suspended animation to while away the time telling ghost stories, although they may be ghosts themselves. In "I Can See Right Through You," an actor past his prime, famous for his role as a vampire, yearns for the leading lady who has replaced him with a parade of eternally younger versions of what he once was—but who is the real demon lover? In "The New Boyfriend," a teenager discontent with her living boyfriend toys with stealing her best friend's birthday present, a limited edi tion Ghost Boyfriend, capable of Spectral Mode. In "Light," Lindsey has two shadows, one of which long ago grew to become her almost-real twin brother. She contemplates a vacation on a "pocket universe," a place "where the food and the air and the landscape seemed like something out of a book you'd read as a child; a brochure; a dream." Lindsey could be describing Link's own stories, creepy little wonders that open out into worlds far vaster than their shells. In a Link story, someone is always trying to escape and someone is always vanishing without a trace. Lovers are forever being stolen away like changelings, and when someone tells you he'll never leave you, you should be very afraid. Exquisite, cruelly wise and the opposite of reassuring, these stories linger like dreams and will leave readers looking over their shoulders for their own ghosts. Copyright Kirkus 2014 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Library Journal Reviews

The cover of Link's new short story collection—the advance copy, anyway—is blanketed with raves from major authors. To be sure, her stories are wonderful creations; the author has a way of concocting a unique world in each piece and drawing in the reader. "The Summer People," for instance, features an Appalachian girl who minds the house of some unseen people, who seem to be both hoarders and fairies. In the futuristic "The New Boyfriend," teenage girls have superficial and dysfunctional relationships with life-sized boyfriend dolls. In "Light," a plucky, hard-drinking woman with two shadows employed at a company that ships and houses the inert victims of a mysterious sleeping epidemic gears up for a hurricane. VERDICT Link's fiction could be described as a combination of George Saunders's eerie near-reality mixed with Amy Hempel's badda-boom timing, plus a dose of Karen Russell's otherworldly tropical sensibility. In short, the tales are imaginatively bizarre yet can be seen as allegorical representations of our own crazy modern world. Most of the protagonists here are female and resourceful; it's a pleasure to immerse oneself in fantasy worlds where women aren't victims or pale stereotypes. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/14.]—Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Publishers Weekly Reviews

These nine stories may begin in familiar territory—a birthday party, a theme park, a bar, a spaceship—but they quickly draw readers into an imaginative, disturbingly ominous world of realistic fantasy and unreal reality. Like Kafka hosting Saturday Night Live, Link mixes humor with existential dread. The first story, entitled "The Summer People," in homage to Shirley Jackson, follows an Appalachian schoolgirl, abandoned by her moonshiner father, as she looks after a summer house occupied by mysterious beings. "I Can See Right Through You" features friends who, in their youth, were movie stars; now in middle age, she is the hostess and he is the guest star of a television show about hunting ghosts at a Florida nudist colony. "Origin Story" takes place in a deserted Land of Oz theme park; "Secret Identity" is set at a hotel where dentists and superheroes attend simultaneous conferences. Only in a Link story would you encounter Mann Man, a superhero with the powers of Thomas Mann, or visit a world with pools overrun by Disney mermaids. Details—a bruise-green sky, a Beretta dotted with Hello Kitty stickers—bring the unimaginable to unnerving life. Each carefully crafted tale forms its own pocket universe, at once ordinary (a teenage girl adores and resents her BFF) and bizarre (...therefore she tries to steal the BFF's robot vampire boyfriend doll). Link's characters, driven by yearning and obsession, not only get in trouble but seek trouble out—to spectacular effect. (Feb.)