From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Klages, whose debut novel, Green Glass Sea (2006), won the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, demonstrates both superior writing skill and a wide range in an impressive short story collection that defies easy categorization. The 16 selections, three of which are original to the volume, include moving mainstream tales of human relationships, like the title story, about a mother and daughter, as well as fantasy and science fiction. The author is equally adept at short, twisty narratives that make the most of premises that could be gimmicks in lesser hands, like the recursive "Möbius, Stripped of a Muse." This collection will linger in the memory long after read-ing, and should help garner a larger audience for Klages's forthcoming second novel.
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Klages' stories contain marvels--small, strange things lurking on the edges of normal life. In the Nebula Award-winning "Basement Magic," a cleaning lady and a little girl build a friendship around housework and magic. "In the House of the Seven Librarians," which closes the book, is a charmer about the unconventional upbringing of a child raised by feral librarians. Not all the stories are particularly concerned with childhood. In "Time Gypsies," a woman travels to the past to recover a paper on time travel that was never delivered and instead discovers the failures of history. Of course, the woman who was to deliver the paper is someone the traveler has admired and researched for years, and what transpires is a case of how meeting someone known only through secondhand sources can change all sorts of assumptions. Klages creates wonder-filled and beautiful worlds in her short stories, making this a tremendously satisfying collection. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Consistently well written and emotionally stimulating, the book is one of the loveliest you'll find. . . . Well worth a gander." —School Library Journal
"Energy and nimbleness . . . Klages treads the invisible line between wonder and the mundane with total control." —The New York Review of Science Fiction (NYRSF)
"Superb first story collection . . . strong emotional stories." —The Denver Post
"Highly recommended. I enjoyed each and every story in the collection." —
SF Revu
"Ellen Klages writes about childhood in brilliant, primary colors. Like Ray Bradbury, her nostalgic stories are like myths." —Maureen McHugh, author, China Mountain Zhang
"The kind of sf writer that comes along once in a decade . . . brilliant stories." —boingboing.net
"An amazing collection . . . each of the sixteen stories here is a gem . . . memorable for the clarity, the simplicity, and the power of their writing." —Black Gate
"For queer readers, this book is a real delight . . . for as anyone who’s ever felt different knows, such secrets [are] more a cause for celebration than self-hate." —somefantastic.org
Book Description
Emerging from a unique and powerful voice, this innovative collection offers a tantalizing glimpse of what lies hidden just beyond the ordinary, skirting the border between childhood and adulthood. Mysticism, heroism, cruelty, and compassion thread through these multifaceted tales—which range from the origins of the Manhattan Project to a culinary object-lesson, from 1950s corruption to a slight glitch in Creation. Collected here for the first time and including an excerpt from her breakout first novel The Green Glass Sea, these stories are timeless and delightful, chilling and beautiful.
About the Author
Ellen Klages is the Nebula Award-winning author of The Green Glass Sea. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous science fiction and fantasy anthologies and magazines, including Black Gate, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons. She lives in San Francisco.
