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Magic For Beginners (2006)

Magic for Beginners (2006)

Book Info

Author
Rating
3.85 of 5 Votes: 5
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ISBN
0156031876 (ISBN13: 9780156031875)
Language
English
Publisher
mariner books

About book Magic For Beginners (2006)

Weird Modern Fairy Tales for Adults by a Writer with a Unique Voice3.5 starsMy introduction to slipstream short story writer Kelly Link was her recently issued Get in Trouble. I got off on the wrong foot with that short story collection and did not finish it.I'm glad I gave her another chance. I liked this collection, Magic for Beginners, a lot better, although it, too had some drawbacks.The author's stories are extremely creative and her voice is totally unique (although there were some vague similarities with Karen Russell's short stories). She's a very talented writer with a good command of some convoluted material. Her characters have great names. She's got a wacky sense of humor and a great ear for dialogue, especially that of kids and teens. Some of the stories vaguely tie in with others. Her favorite themes include the relationships between the living and the dead, animals with human characteristics, witches, zombies, etc.On the down side, her stories often seemed a bit too twee and cutesy. Her work could have benefited from a dollop of gravitas here and there, although I suppose then it wouldn't be Kelly Link.Here's the rundown on the stories in this collection. I listened to the audio.1.t"The Faery Handbag". I think this might have been the best story in the book. Rebecca Lowman vocalized it really well. The narrator's grandmother, Zofia, claims to have been born in a country called Baldeziwurlekistan. Zofia tells the narrator the story of her fantastic handbag, which contains worlds inside it.2.t"The Hortlak". Wonderful and strange story about two guys who work in an all night store near Ausable Chasm (upstate NY near the Canadian border). Apparently the Chasm is a sort of borderland/conduit between the living and the dead. Some of their customers are Canadian zombies (who pass through the Chasm to get to the store?) They are trying to figure out what to sell to zombies. They have a female friend who works the overnight shift in an animal shelter and doesn't like the fact that she has to kill the dogs in the shelter. Kirby Hayborne read this story expertly.3. "The Cannon". This was a strange story about a cannon and its relationships with dead and living people. The narrator is called Venus Shebby and used to be beautiful. Venus was fired from a cannon to a different country where she stayed. Her brother was fired from a cannon. I think I'd need to reread this as some of the details escaped me. Arthur Morey and Meera Simhan narrated, and the audio also features Lorna Raver4."Stone Animals" is a wonderful tale about a family who move into a house (in upstate NY) that's overrun with rabbits and other strange creatures, including some stone statues that seem to come alive at night. Cassandra Campbell read the story quite well. 5."Catskin" delineates the death of a witch and the life of her "children" (stolen from humans) and the histories of some strange cats, including one called "The Witch's Revenge". This was like a demented version of a Grimm fairytale. Mark Bramhall was the reader.6."Some Zombie Contingency Plans" A guy named Soap who just got out of jail for a minor art theft crashes a party at a suburban house. He meets Carly and her little brother, Leo. I liked this story. This one's read by Robbie Daymond7."The Great Divorce". Alan Robley (living) and Lavvie Tyler (dead) are considering a divorce, as there are problems in a "mixed" marriage (between dead and living people). Lorna Raver narrates.8."Magic for Beginners". This is a very meta story about a boy, Jeremy Mars, who lives in Plantagenet, Vermont, and his parents and a very popular internet TV show ("The Library") The story is meta because Jeremy is watching the show with his friends and relatives and at the same time (without knowing it) is a part of the show. Jeremy wants to save the show's main character, Fox. His mother, a librarian, and his dad, a horror novelist, have a fight and his mom, to get away from her husband, takes Jeremy on a road trip to Vegas. The dialogue, especially among the kids, was very realistic. But the story was way too long and it dragged. The audio narrator was Meera Simhan.9."Lull". Good and very bizarre story. It's too convoluted to give a summary. Ed, who's separated from Susan, calls up a paid-by-the-minute "reader" at a party and she tells him a bizarre story about himself and Susan, involving the Devil, aliens, a cheerleader, and green Susan beer from which grow multiple Susans. Plus, the narrative runs backwards. A weird tour-de-force. Danny Campbell is an excellent narrator.

The Faery HandbagA young woman loses a handbag her grandmother had given her that contains a magical village within it. I liked it, but the first person character was somewhat hard to nail down; the protagonist was somewhat vaguely sketched. Whether by intention or accident, I can't say, but I found it distracting. 3/5The HortlakThis is a strange story that captivated me in spite of its weirdness. The world it describes is horrifying and the story goes nowhere, and yet I found myself hoping that the central character would find the escape he craved. 4/5The CanonAlmost more of a poem than a story, The Canon is framed as a series of questions whose answers almost make perfect nonsense. 3/5Stone AnimalsBlending the lines between dream, reality, psychosis, and just plain, oddity, this story tells the tale of a family trying to come to terms with a haunted house. 3/5CatskinAlthough I enjoyed this story, it was hard at times to avoid the feeling that there was weirdness here just for the sake of being weird, that the story was a little conventional if one disregarded a few of the more outlandish sentences. Still, it's a story about witches and cats and houses and how they're all really kind of the same thing. 4/5Some Zombie Contingency PlansGiven that this is a collection of odd, magical realist stories where nothing makes sense and everything means something else, you'd think a twist ending would be a little easier to spot. But no. This stories isn't about zombies as much as it is what their attacks leave behind. 4/5The Great DivorceMore than a little bittersweet, the story takes as its premise that the living can, and do, interact with the dead. What happens then, when a dead woman and a yet living man decide to get divorced? 5/5Magic for BeginnersThis is easily my favorite story in the collection; it reads like a more somber Daniel Pinkwater with that same sense of odd rightness that lurks just below the everyday wrongness of mundanity, something we could reach if we can just get hold of it the right way. It's the story of a boy named Jeremy who drives to Las Vegas with his mother and it's the story of a boy who's just discovering that the girls who are his friends could be so much more than that. And it's the story of a boy who saves a fox without ever knowing if he succeeded. 5/5LullLull is a story within a story within a story and is more about the nature of stories and how we can change them from within than it is about the actual story. 4/5

Do You like book Magic For Beginners (2006)?

Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners collection. Pretty awesome. A lot of “coming of age” stuff and adolescent themes. But beyond charming and cute. Insightful and provocative. And sexy in that “I just found out what sexy is” sort of way. Highlights include “The Faery Handbag” (makes you bite your lip and fall in love with life again), the puzzlingly epiphanic “The Hotlak”, and the absolutely fucking terrifying “Stone Animals”. There are a couple of these short stories I feel the need to re-read to fully “get” them (e.g., I was unprepared for the many layers of “Catskin”) but these are positively fantastic stories. Best fiction of 2006? Maybe not but certainly very very good.[http://blog.founddrama.net/2007/02/ju...]UPDATE: added the "ambulothanatophobia" tag/bookshelf because I just remembered that a couple of the stories feature zombies!
—Rob

Some of the stories were pretty amazing--the kind you finish and immediately want to start again to see what you might have missed. I like the air of mystery and missing-ness, the way she fills the pages but leaves spaces inbetween for the imagination. I'd read some of these in anthologies. There were stories I loved (The Hortlak, Some Zombie Contingency Plans, The Faery Handbag), some I liked a lot but didn't connect to as well (The Great Divorce), some that didn't work for me (The Lull) and one that I loved reading but felt ultimately disappointed by (the title story). It's annoying when writers leave a storyline hanging just because they can, and that's what this story felt like. Still ... a great unfettered mind at work, and that's always good to see.
—Kathryn

A short story by Kelly Link is a suicide snow cone that tastes like the best thing you never knew you could have.Turning the pages of Magic for Beginners, you are never quite sure what you will get, but after one or two stories you quickly realize that this random unknowing is the one constant, and what you quickly learn to love about a Kelly Link story. You welcome the jump, allowing the rabbit hole door to lock behind you, even hoping that it does. When I say rabbit hole, I really mean the secret blanket-fort in the living room of Kelly Link's imagination, the one that tunnels under the kitchen to a place that you never knew existed --at least not in most fiction.It's a varied tour. Link plays guide and storyteller with an acrobatic confidence, creating stories both humorous and slyly sage, imagination gymnastics that cartwheels upon itself, a mature reincarnation of Captain Kangaroo telling Kipling's "Just So" stories, only different. She may type them out for the sake of publishing, but it's quite possible that she simply has them dictated as they form in her head, maybe around a camp fire somewhere inside the blanket-fort. Perhaps after a few drinks. Probably. That storytelling voice is the stage star of the secret show, but all of the characters are there with you. They would have to be -- they are real after all, certainly real after reading. They are my friends --I think so anyway. If Kelly Link told me so, I'd believe her. That is the magic trick. You can see for yourself if you watch closely.
—Boden Steiner

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