bedside table, cont.

Pretty Monsters -- Kelly Link (2008): I read this so long ago -- I've put off writing it up because I was disappointed compared to her previous two collections (which I love). In retrospect, anticipating it so much made my disappointment more acute than it would have been if I'd picked it up with no expectations. But it was impossible for me to quell all expectation since she'd already written some of my favorite short fiction! Sigh. Time has passed and my disappointment has dimmed, so here's a list of the pros and cons for me.

the good:

1) the cover is creepy and beautiful.

2) many of her best stories are reprinted again here: Magic for Beginners, The Faery Handbag, and The Specialist's Hat were all in earlier collections. They're really good. (My favorite of these is Magic for Beginners, but they're all great in their own way.)

3) The Constable of Abal is a wonderful fairy tale/dark Oz story. It reminded me how freaky some of the Oz books are, which in turn reminded me of the deep weirdness of many old fairy tales. (you know: blood-eating ghosts, gender-swapping, child laborers, magic spells, kidnapping, the room you can't go into, etc.) Great atmospherics, too -- when I was a kid, one of my favorite things about fairy tales (and the Oz books) is how they conjured these incredible locations, recognizable, but unlike any place I knew. This story brought back that little bit of magic for me. Of the new stories, this one may have been my favorite.

4) The Wrong Grave reminds me of a one-off episode of Buffy. (I mean this in a good way.)

5) Shaun "The Arrival" Tan illustrated!


the bad:

1) disappointing because 3 out of 9 stories are from her previous books.

2) title story is SO CLOSE to being great, but it's off just enough to make me mad. (I know! sounds like a personal problem.) Maybe it would improve if I read it again, only every time I think about reading it again I'm all short-story heartbroken (and irritated) once more. I'll try the old fashioned cure for heartbreak of all kinds and give it more time.

3) The Surfer takes a long (l-o-n-g) time to go nowhere. Maybe that's the point. Maybe I just didn't get it, which is very possible.

4) there was more, but it's been so long now I've mostly forgotten, so probably not worth listing.



There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell -- Laurie Notaro (2007): It's funny. I like that it's "women's fiction" that's not about bagging a man like some big game hunter. In this novel our heroine Maye is happily married, but has just moved cross country and has no friends. (They moved to the pacific northwest, so it's sort of extra funny for me to see local obsessions from a newcomer's point of view. In fact, one of the things that pulled me right out of the book is the malted she takes to Ruby in a STYROFOAM CUP, despite having gone on at length about the community's styrofoam-hating ways. which I share.)

Anyway, Maye wants friends and she wants them bad -- this desire is the engine for the whole adventure. The thing that made me nuts about this novel is its dependence on excess Zaniness. Capital ZANY. I like funny, I like slapstick, I like screwball, but it misses the mark with me when they all happen at once with jazz hands and flaming batons. Like I said -- I laughed! aloud! more than once! But there were parts where it felt like she didn't trust her story enough (she should have) and felt she needed some nacho-cheese covered simile to distract the reader (she didn't). Notaro is best known for her non-fiction collections (like The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club); I believe this is her first novel. She's hilarious -- there's no question about that, but I found this book to be occasionally exhausting. (which isn't to say I didn't rush home from work to finish reading it, because I did.) I will probably check out some of her non-fiction stuff, but maybe not for a little while.