Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

What an awesome collection of short stories. Kelly Link has a mind that captures the fragility of ordinary and the magic of incompleteness. She mixes a gentle sense of humanity with the uncompromising alienness of the fairy story and in so doing delivers a magical series of stories.

That's not to say it's an easy read. When one finished story after story where you're not quite sure if the author just stopped writing or intended to leave it feeling unresolved it can be jarring - especially when we're so used to having stories hold our hands to a well sign posted ending. This is not for the dumbed down.

Yet if you like adventurous reading, stories that will take you to the unexpected realms of the commonplace made weird then Link's writing is for you. In some ways I'd place her close to an American (and specifically female) version of Rushdie in his Midnight's Children phase. She's not similar politically or culturally but they share a magic of the unexpected but somehow fitting that I've rarely experienced.

I could go on, the world ethereal, silk, comforting and double edged need mentioning but like Link I'll think leave you with a sense of the unresolved.