Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Kelly Link creates a world like no other, where ghosts of girlfriends past rub up against Scrabble-loving grandmothers with terrifying magic handbags, wizards sit alongside morbid babysitters, and we encounter a people-eating monster who claims to have a sense of humour.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Readers as yet unfamiliar with Link (Magic for Beginners) will be excited to discover her singular voice in this collection of nine short stories, her first book for young adults. The first entry, "The Wrong Grave," immediately demonstrates her rare talents: a deadpan narration that conceals the author's metafictional sleight-of-hand ("Miles had always been impulsive. I think you should know that right up front"); subjects that range from absurd to mundane, all observed with equidistant irony. Miles, hoping to recover the poems he's buried with his dead girlfriend, digs up what appears to be the wrong corpse ("It's a mistake anyone could make," interjects the narrator), who regains life and visits her mother, a lapsed Buddhist ("Mrs. Baldwin had taken her Buddhism very seriously, once, before substitute teaching had knocked it out of her'). Other stories have more overtly magical or intertextual themes; in each, Link's peppering of her prose with random associations dislocates readers from the ordinary. With a quirky, fairytale style evocative of Neil Gaiman, the author mingles the grotesque and the ethereal to make magic on the page. Ages 12-up. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

Gr 8 Up-Kelly Link's offbeat, quirky collection (Viking, 2008) of nine short stories, ranging from fantasy to horror to sci-fi, features ordinary teens who find themselves in bizarre and unusual situations. Unexpected plot twists, deadpan humor, and magic are abundant. Link, in her first collection for young adults, dances around the edge of reality in each story and leaves the endings wide open. It's almost as if the stories end a beat or two before they should, and many listeners will be left wondering, how did that happen? Listening a second time may lead to buried clues that help explain each tale's conclusion. For example, in "The Wrong Grave," Miles tries to retrieve the only copy of poems he wrote for his now dead girlfriend. Could he really have made a mistake and unearthed the wrong casket? In "Magic for Beginners," Jeremy and his friends are avid fans of the TV series The Library which has no set schedule and runs on different networks. Is the show or Jeremy's life reality? These strange, twisted plots also touch on teen issues of friendship, first love, adolescence, and more. Each unique story has a different narrator who expertly conveys its humor, suspense, and terror. These seasoned readers, including Christina Moore, Andy Paris, and Alyssa Bresnahan, among others, employ skilled pacing and a straightforward tone which adds to the surreal nature of the stories. Fans of macabre tales and works by Neil Gaiman will find much to enjoy.-Wendy Woodfill, Hennepin County Library, Minnetonka, MN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Link, who has two breathlessly received books of strange, surrealistic tales for adults under her belt, makes the leap into the YA fold with this collection of short stories (most previously published in separate anthologies) that tug at the seams of reality, sometimes gently, sometimes violently. In nearly every one of these startlingly, sometimes confoundingly original stories, Link defies expectations with such terrific turnarounds that you are left precipitously wondering not only What's going to happen now? but also Wait, what just happened? Her conception of fantasy is so unique that when she uses words like ghost or magic, they mean something very different than they do anywhere else. Perhaps most surprisingly and memorably is Link's dedicated deadpan delivery that drives home how funny she can be, no matter how dark the material gets. After gobbling up a group of campers, a monster with a self-proclaimed sense of humor bargains with the terrified lone survivor, How about if I only eat you if you say the number that I'm thinking of? I promise I won't cheat. I probably won't cheat. Shaun Tan contributes a handful of small illustrations that are, of course, just plain delightful.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2008 Booklist