I’ve read Link’s work before and enjoyed it, so I was happy
to see this book offered from Vine. One
of the stories, ‘The Summer People’, I’d read before and I have to say it’s the
best story in the book. A teenage girl is obliged to take care of vacation
houses for people; clean the houses, buy their groceries and stock the
kitchens, clean up after them. One of the houses, though, is home to some
rather different people, people who need her to supply them with odd things and
give odd presents in return. It’s a modern fairy tale.
The rest, sadly, I was rather disappointed in. They all have
Link’s strain of weird, but they aren’t charming like a lot of her work has
been. They are set in dreary, depressing situations. The people are at best
boring and vaguely annoying; at worst, obnoxious- in other words, like regular people
are when not having good days. Even the magic/fantasy components seem joyless.
Teen age girls with crushes on full size animated dolls (who have no memory of
who they were before), superheroes with crappy powers, aging daemon lovers,
space crews who don’t know if they are alive or dead. Link’s fantasy world has
turned dark.
The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something, Amazon will give me a few cents.
I received this book free from the Amazon Vine program in return for a fair review.
Neither of these things influenced my review.
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