Magic for Beginners: Stories
Issue #25
By Lauren Strasnick
Published: September 1st, 2005 | 1:32pm
When I like a book, I tend to physically abuse it, leaving creased corners, a ripped cover, grease stains, and underlined sentences. And I practically destroyed Kelly Link’s second story collection, Magic for Beginners. On my copy of the book, there’s wavy, crinkled pages from where I spilled water, and a big orange splotch on page 93 from one especially messy spaghetti dinner. The entire book has changed shape, due in part to being curled up in my purse for a week.
These eight great, weird stories, all illustrated by Shelley Jackson (The Melancholy of Anatomy), sit just a little left of reality: a convenience store patronized mainly by zombies; people dressed up in cat suits; alien wives; bunnies; an entire life moving backward instead of forward. My favorite story in the collection, by far, is “Stone Animals,” about a family that move into a stately old home overrun by rabbits and weird hauntings. Household objects —soap, a television, toothbrush, and paintbrush — turn inexplicably creepy and unusable. And coming in a close second, “The Faery Handbag,” where a teen girl learns from her oddball grandmother the details of a hairy purse and how it acts as entryway into another world. The story is so good I cried.
Though there were one or two stories I had a tough time getting into — for example, the shortest story, “The Canon,” which was a little too esoteric for my taste — Magic for Beginners, like Link’s acclaimed first collection, Stranger Things Happen, is well observed, original, complex, and engaging. What more could a girl ask for? Well, a new, perfectly pristine copy of the book, to start.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Magic for Beginners: Stories (Small Beer Press)
By Kelly Link
272 pages, $24
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