Get in Trouble in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 02, 2015 Tony rated it liked it

Shelves: short-stories

I read one of Link's collections years ago and really enjoyed it, so thought I'd give this new one a whirl. She's got a distinct voice and sensibility, but for some reason, the mix of nine stories didn't work as well for me as I recall with the earlier book. The sense of inventiveness and wit is there, along with plenty of interesting characters, but the execution is turgid and flat.

It probably didn't help that my favorite story in the collection is the first one, "The Summer People." Its heroin I read one of Link's collections years ago and really enjoyed it, so thought I'd give this new one a whirl. She's got a distinct voice and sensibility, but for some reason, the mix of nine stories didn't work as well for me as I recall with the earlier book. The sense of inventiveness and wit is there, along with plenty of interesting characters, but the execution is turgid and flat.

It probably didn't help that my favorite story in the collection is the first one, "The Summer People." Its heroine is a contemporary teenage girl living mostly on her own in the countryside near a summer resort. Ever since her mother ran away, she's had to be the caretaker of a nearby home that is the lair for a tribe of capricious fairies. When the girl falls ill and is being nursed by a new friend from school, she realizes that she might be a able to take a break from fairy-caretaking... The other strong story is "The New Boyfriend", in which the friendships of teen girls is dissected as one gets a kind of animatronic gift that another had craved. Jealousy kicks in plays out in cunning and unsettling ways.

In "I Can See Right Through You", an actor whose entire career rests on his appearance in a famous '80s vampire film goes to meet up with his old flame, who is shooting a ghost-chaser documentary series at an abandoned nudist colony. Weird, but not necessarily interesting stuff happens. "Secret Identity" recounts a teenager's trip to New York to meet up with a fellow online gamer -- again, not interesting enough to sustain the fifty or so pages it takes up. "Valley of the Girls" has a good premise, mashing up the Ancient Egyptian elite with Gossip Girl-like teens. Some fun stuff there, but the ending has the wrong feel, too much of a classic Twilight Zone vibe. "Two Houses" is a riff on classic ghost stories set on a drifting spacecraft, but is lacking in any kind of spark.

"Light" has a lot of potential, its protagonist works at a Florida warehouse full of people who have fallen into a coma-like slumber of unknown origin. It's a recognizable present, but one in which alternate "pocket" universes have been discovered, and are travel to them is commonplace. Again, some interesting possibilities that never cohere over the 40+ pages. If you're a big fan of strange short fiction, you could definitely do worse than dip into this book -- but you might do better trying one of her earlier ones. ...more

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Feb 16, 2015 Jessica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: short-story, speculative-fiction

I picked this up on the strength of a good review in The Economist, and it didn't disappoint. Writing short speculative fiction is, in my mind, very difficult because you get so little space in which to set your scene and tell your story, but Link finds a way to use those constraints as positives. There are heartbreaks and pitfalls scattered throughout, but each tale leaves you with the sense that things have worked out in the way they were meant to all along. ...more

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