Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners short story collection is one of the most difficult books I have ever read. I loved every story with one exception, one that I just couldn’t get through because I was so uncomfortable with the cats and witches and death, but every other story was captivating and enthralling. Maybe I’ll go back and try that Catskin story again.

She does funny things with time, this writer. It goes forwards and backwards and sideways and spins around and comes back again. She has a strange way with literary structure — stories loop in on themselves and make my head spin. Each story is a little universe, each one pulls me in, and then ends mysteriously and evaporates into the mist. Each story is a dream, a long dream, a dream that ends when you wake up with the sun beating down and you wonder if you could have just slept a little longer how it might have all worked itself out but you will never know because that is how dreams are.

There is some strange twisted logic in these stories, like they are all in a weird magical alternate universe very close to but yet very different from our own. It is all so very frustrating. But so very worth it.