- Paperback: 266 pages
- Publisher: Small Beer Press; 1 edition (July 1 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1931520003
- ISBN-13: 978-1931520003
- Product Dimensions: 21.9 x 14.1 x 1.7 cm
- Shipping Weight: 363 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #250,351 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
The 11 fantasies in this first collection from rising star Link are so quirky and exuberantly imagined that one is easily distracted from their surprisingly serious underpinnings of private pain and emotional estrangement. In "Water Off a Black Dog's Back," a na‹ve young man who has never known personal loss finds that the only way he can curry favor with his lover's physically afflicted family is to suffer a bizarre amputation. The protagonist in "Travels with the Snow Queen" reconsiders her fairy-tale romance when she deconstructs the clich‚s of traditional fairy tales and realizes that their heroines inevitably sacrifice and suffer much more than their heroes do. Link favors impersonal and potentially off-putting postmodern narrative approaches, but draws readers to the emotional core of her stories through vulnerable but brave characters who cope gamely with all the strangeness the world can throw their way. In the book's most effective tale, "Vanishing Act," a young girl's efforts to magically reunite herself with her distant family by withdrawing from the world around her poignantly calls attention to the spiritual vacancies and absence of affection in the family she stays with. "The Specialist's Hat" features twin sisters whose morbid obsessions seems due as much to their father's parental neglect as their mother's death. Although a few of the selections seem little more than awkward freshman exercises in the absurd, the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds, illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Link offers strange and tantalizing stories--contemporary fiction with a fairy-tale ambience--that explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both. She boldly weaves myth and fairy tale into contemporary life, drawing inspiration from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, from the fairy tale of Cinderella, from the writings of C. S. Lewis, and from the true story of the Donner party's descent into cannibalism. Meet Humphrey, one of Zeus' many illegitimate sons, and June, his girlfriend, who decides to travel to Hades to bring Humphrey back. Learn the rules of being dead, and find out what really happened between Kay and the Snow Queen. Ask yourself what would have happened to the prince if he had never found the girl whose foot fit the glass slipper. Link uses the nonsensical to illuminate truth, blurring the distinctions between the mundane and the fantastic to tease out the underlying meanings of modern life. Bonnie Johnston
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dreamy and smart and beautiful...,
By A Customer
This review is from: Stranger Things Happen: Stories (Paperback)
Kelly Link makes everything magical. Her words have lived inside my head since the day I opened this book. I don't care if you're a half-dead tweaker or a Head of State in a facist regime or a normal person who's just looking for something that'll make a plane ride less cramped and smelly...this is your book. It's for you. Waiting right here. The stories are spectacular in their breadth and their whimsy and their wonder. And then you can come back and re-read them, and they've changed a little, because you've changed a little...and the reading process becomes so pleasant and sublime that the other books on your shelves are going to get jealous.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Strange...,
By L. Berk "Leah Lionheart" (Praha, CR) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Stranger Things Happen: Stories (Paperback)
"Stranger Things Happen" is Kelly Link's freshman work of fiction. Within it are eleven exquisitely crafted short stories which range from weird to the truly bizarre. It is difficult to catogorise Link's writing, as it seems to straddle science fiction and fantasy, narrative and fiction, real and unreal. "The Specialist's Hat" is really one of the spookiest stories I have ever read. It is loosely written (as are many of the stories), which - rather than impeding the text - makes it easier to adapt. Her writing seems to permeate right into one's head, letting the reader formulate each story by themselves while being gently urged on by Link. She guides, but does not dictate, the reader. As a result, one makes each story one's own: This compounds how generally creepy her writing is. The stories are also puncutated with truly odd characters. In "Water off a Black Dog's Back," the boy's girlfriend's father is a bizarre character. He is lacking a nose, and therefore replaces it with a prosthesis according to circumstnace -- sometimes a wooden one, sometimes a steel one. Link again keeps her writing somewhat vague, but defined enough to paint a rather striking - and oddly frightening - picture of rural life under her twisted pen. The fact that this is Link's first book shows, however. While her writing is strong (she shows remarkable talant), there are immature aspects to it, as well. Her stories can be somewhat "plotless" - they are more like literary sketches of disturbing scenarios. Although, this is also what renders her writing so captivating: She makes a story out of some strange event. She does not present a problem to be solved, a climax, a resolution. It's almost as if she leaves that to the reader, choosing instead to lay the groundwork for one's mind to grind away at -- as a reader, we torment ourselves thinking more of what Link has written than what is actually on the page. Kudos to Link for her uncanny ability to turn the familiar into the frightening. Her writing conveys a sense of uneasiness, she manages to make the most normal circumstances into the most disturbing. She is an excellent, captivating writer.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very much like no one but herself,
By
This review is from: Stranger Things Happen: Stories (Paperback)
Kelly Link writes sort of like Neil Gaiman and sort of like Karen Joy Fowler and very much like no one but herself. The stories are spooky and sad and strange and funny and fine, and the book itself is gorgeously produced. My favorites are probably "The Specialist's Hat", "The Girl Detective", and "Flying Lessons": love and joy and going down into the Underworld, up into the shadows, out into Faerie, in search of the lost. But there isn't a bad story in the lot; the worst I can say about any of them is that the early "Water Off a Black Dog's Back" doesn't quite achieve either the tenderness or the chill it needs to work, and falls flat. (I'm rather sorry I read this when it came out, in retrospect, because it put me off trying the rest of her stories for a while.) But the rest of them are indescribably strange and incredibly good.Several of the stories are available online. Check 'em out.
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