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Stranger Things Happen

By Kelly Link

(7)

| Paperback | 9781931520003

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Book Description

This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators and extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and honeymooners, revenants and readers alike, on a voyage into new, strange, and wonderful territory. The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve theContinue

4 Reviews

1 person find this helpful

The young writer and the fairy tales

A very pleasant reading of strange stories from a young and very talented writer. Whether she revises Cinderella in modern times, or narrates the story of Louise's friend Louise, Link can always entertain, make you smile and shed a tear.
Not all the stories are as well written as one might exp ... (continue)

A very pleasant reading of strange stories from a young and very talented writer. Whether she revises Cinderella in modern times, or narrates the story of Louise's friend Louise, Link can always entertain, make you smile and shed a tear.
Not all the stories are as well written as one might expect from the brilliant beginning, but the whole book is still absolutely worth reading.

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Zugi ☯ said on Sep 15, 2009 | Add your feedback

Surreal Fantasy

Even though I had trouble figuring out exactly what these haunting, suggestive fantasy stories were about, I could recognize that the author is very talented. The tales often incorporate elements of familiar fairy tales but reworked in a rather disturbing and adult manner. I suspect people will gene ... (continue)

Even though I had trouble figuring out exactly what these haunting, suggestive fantasy stories were about, I could recognize that the author is very talented. The tales often incorporate elements of familiar fairy tales but reworked in a rather disturbing and adult manner. I suspect people will generally get some very different messages from these stories, being as they are almost dream-like in quality, but few who read them shall deny that a great new talent is at work here.
This collection is available free for download from the excellent eBook site, www.feedbooks.com, as is most of Kelly Link's second collection, Magic For Beginners (which is missing two award-winning stories, though, that can be read elsewhere on the internet - see the comments on the Feedbooks site under the entry for Magic For Beginners to find out where the missing stories are freely available).
Kelly Link has won has won a Hugo award, three Nebula awards, and a World Fantasy Award for her fiction already (circa 2010), and this début collection impressively includes wins for a Nebula Award for Best Novelette ("Louise's Ghost"), a World Fantasy Award ("The Specialist's Hat"), and a James Tiptree, Jr. Award ("Travels with the Snow Queen"). I found the story "Shoe And Marriage" to be one of the most disturbingly impressive entries, a strange mixture of foot-fetishism, Cinderella, sado-masochism, and Nazi-like fascism. Whatever you may think of Link, she certainly has a distinctive voice.
If you are a fan of the magical reality genre (e.g. Jorge Luis Borges, or Isabel Allende) then give this freely downloadable book a look-in. I generally prefer stories that have a definite conclusion and that follow a rational story line, yet Kelly Link's stories held my attention somehow, so do not necessarily dismiss this collection merely because it is more surreal and dream-like.
I read this on my Kindle. The ebook has an active contents page and is free of spelling and typographical errors, and one can easily navigate from story to story as each of them has an active and linked title.
At zero cost, this is a very worthwhile collection to read, or at least try out. Perhaps you will like the stories so much you will buy a hard-copy as a gift for someone, and so doing, support a very talented author.

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Ramnagel said on Jul 19, 2010 | Add your feedback

The only reason I finished this book is because I read Magic for beginners first and I liked that one slightly more than this collection.
In the end, I guess Link just isn't for me. I like my stories to make sense, to have some internal logic and structure I can follow and, possibly, an endi ... (continue)

The only reason I finished this book is because I read Magic for beginners first and I liked that one slightly more than this collection.
In the end, I guess Link just isn't for me. I like my stories to make sense, to have some internal logic and structure I can follow and, possibly, an ending or a hint of an explanation my mind can work upon.
Link's stories instead feel to me more like a dream - scenes, images, moments where time slows down like molasses or jumps all over the place, where strange things happen without reason beyond 'odd is cool'. The characters felt just as dreamlike, devoid of life and motivations, and I couldn't really sympathize with them. I finished every segment asking myself what actually happened, and why, and why should I care.
If you like when people tell you their latest weird dreams, Kelly Link's books are definitely up your alley. If you're looking for stories, well, they're not.

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Ian Atrus said on Jun 18, 2010 | Add your feedback

My thoughts

This was a very good collection of fantasy stories with a twist. I especially liked the stories "Travels with the Snow Queen," "Flying Lessons," and "Shoe and Marriage."

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krin5292 said on Apr 12, 2010 | Add your feedback