taken from Goodreads:
Link's work is truly unique. Time Out New York called her stories “cross-genre gems,” and her admirers in the literary community—from Peter Straub and Karen Joy Fowler to Alice Sebold and Michael Chabon—reflect the amazing range that makes her style so special. Call it kitchen sink magical realism: Fantastic and bizarre but funny and down to earth, there is something for everyone in Magic for Beginners"
I'm familiar with Link mostly as an editor, since I've read every edition of The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. I've read a story here or there, and two of the ones I remember most clearly are actually in this collection.
I am admittedly a big fan of short stories, and have been for a very long time. When I was younger and first delving into the science fiction and fantasy genre, I spent my own money on Sword & Sorcery short story collections; these were often my first acquaintance with authors whom I grew to love, and I still maintain that short stories offer a "way in" to the work of many authors.
But you have to be careful as well, because short stories, especially those that cross over into the weird, the wacky, the eerie, the surreal -- well, they often seem less like short stories and more like short experiments. So it can be offputting to pick up a collection and expect each story to be nicely wrapped up and complete, following that story arc we all learn about in middle school English, with rising action, the climax, and then everything nicely back to the way it was, just a bit different.
Link's stories don't follow any typical narrative structure, and she constantly plays with your expectations. Her stories are just strange, yet it's that otherness that kept me reading. After a bit I quit trying to force my own expectations onto the stories and just enjoyed them for what they were. Link writes beautifully, and I was entranced by many of her descriptions. A few of the stories fell flat for me, but then, I've never picked up a story collection and enjoyed every single selection -- it's normal to find some unevenness in the set. I do recommend these stories to fans of magic realism or to readers who are willing to step back and just follow a story to the strange places it goes.
