Pretty Monsters

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY SEP 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.