So, you guys, I used to work at a small publishing house. This was fifteen years ago, and I was mainly a copyeditor and proofreader, but I ended up designing a few books while I was there. It was kind of fun, and while the books I designed couldn't hang with any the big boy publishers put out, they looked professionally done and I was proud of them.
Fast forward to now. I ordered a copy of Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners in paperback from Amazon, because I needed some paperbacks that could get trashed at the pool or the lake on vacation. When it got here I was a little thrown, because it was HUGE. It appeared to be a large-print edition or something, even though Amazon didn't list it as such. Basically, it looked like someone printed the text of the collection from Word and glued it together with a cheap cover. Well, I started reading it a couple of days ago and finished yesterday. Not only are there two stories missing from the original edition--including the title story!--one story was printed twice. (I found a note in the front papers indicating the two stories were left out "due to contractual obligations," but nothing about the repeated story.) Oh, and there are no illustrations. I'm obviously going to have track a hardback version down from the library to get the whole thing.
I reported it to Amazon as defective and I'm sending it back.
But on the plus side, I did get to read seven of the nine stories. Three were amazing, two were not that great, and two were decent. Link's stories are typically termed magical realism (I've also seen them called surreal), so they're not for everyone. Let's take "The Hortlak" for starters. It's about two guys who work in a convenience store at the edge of town. They also happen to live there. Every night, a woman drives by on her way to work at the local animal shelter. She drives by several times a night, actually, each time with a different dog hanging out the window. She gives the dogs one last ride, one last bit of freedom, before she euthanizes them. Oh, and there are zombies. See what I mean about her style? This was one of the ones I didn't particularly enjoy; the symbolism felt heavy-handed and wasn't really apparent until the last couple of pages. The rest of the story felt like filler. The three I loved were a little more traditional. "Stone Animals" and "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" were rooted in seemingly normal worlds, where only little things were off, but those little things grew. The other, "Catskin" reads more like a fairy tale, a genre most of us are familiar with, but there too, a few little things were not quite right. "Lull" and "The Great Divorce" were both decent stories, but I doubt I'll remember them in a week or a month or a year like the other three.
On the whole, I'd recommend skipping this one. Go instead for Link's latest collection, Get in Trouble, as it's much stronger and absolutely worth the read. If you do decide to get Magic for Beginners, GET THE HARDBACK edition.
Title: Magic for Beginners
Author: Kelly Link
Star rating: 3 out of 5 for content; 1 out of 5 for production
Buy, Borrow, Skip: Skip
Bonus advice: Get the hardback to avoid issues with missing stories!
Fast forward to now. I ordered a copy of Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners in paperback from Amazon, because I needed some paperbacks that could get trashed at the pool or the lake on vacation. When it got here I was a little thrown, because it was HUGE. It appeared to be a large-print edition or something, even though Amazon didn't list it as such. Basically, it looked like someone printed the text of the collection from Word and glued it together with a cheap cover. Well, I started reading it a couple of days ago and finished yesterday. Not only are there two stories missing from the original edition--including the title story!--one story was printed twice. (I found a note in the front papers indicating the two stories were left out "due to contractual obligations," but nothing about the repeated story.) Oh, and there are no illustrations. I'm obviously going to have track a hardback version down from the library to get the whole thing.
I reported it to Amazon as defective and I'm sending it back.
But on the plus side, I did get to read seven of the nine stories. Three were amazing, two were not that great, and two were decent. Link's stories are typically termed magical realism (I've also seen them called surreal), so they're not for everyone. Let's take "The Hortlak" for starters. It's about two guys who work in a convenience store at the edge of town. They also happen to live there. Every night, a woman drives by on her way to work at the local animal shelter. She drives by several times a night, actually, each time with a different dog hanging out the window. She gives the dogs one last ride, one last bit of freedom, before she euthanizes them. Oh, and there are zombies. See what I mean about her style? This was one of the ones I didn't particularly enjoy; the symbolism felt heavy-handed and wasn't really apparent until the last couple of pages. The rest of the story felt like filler. The three I loved were a little more traditional. "Stone Animals" and "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" were rooted in seemingly normal worlds, where only little things were off, but those little things grew. The other, "Catskin" reads more like a fairy tale, a genre most of us are familiar with, but there too, a few little things were not quite right. "Lull" and "The Great Divorce" were both decent stories, but I doubt I'll remember them in a week or a month or a year like the other three.
On the whole, I'd recommend skipping this one. Go instead for Link's latest collection, Get in Trouble, as it's much stronger and absolutely worth the read. If you do decide to get Magic for Beginners, GET THE HARDBACK edition.
Title: Magic for Beginners
Author: Kelly Link
Star rating: 3 out of 5 for content; 1 out of 5 for production
Buy, Borrow, Skip: Skip
Bonus advice: Get the hardback to avoid issues with missing stories!
RSS Feed
