Pretty Monsters: Stories

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Overview

Kelly Link has lit up adult literary publishing?and Viking is honored to publish her first YA story collection. Through the lens of Link?s vivid imagination, nothing is what it seems, and everything deserves a second look. From the multiple award-winning ?The Faery Handbag,? in which a teenager?s grandmother carries an entire village (or is it a man-eating dog?) in her handbag, to the near-future of ?The Surfer,? whose narrator (a soccer-playing skeptic) waits with a planeload of refugees for the aliens to ...
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Pretty Monsters

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More About This Book

Overview

Kelly Link has lit up adult literary publishing?and Viking is honored to publish her first YA story collection. Through the lens of Link?s vivid imagination, nothing is what it seems, and everything deserves a second look. From the multiple award-winning ?The Faery Handbag,? in which a teenager?s grandmother carries an entire village (or is it a man-eating dog?) in her handbag, to the near-future of ?The Surfer,? whose narrator (a soccer-playing skeptic) waits with a planeload of refugees for the aliens to arrive, Link?s stories are funny and full of unexpected insights and skewed perspectives on the world. Her fans range from Michael Chabon to Peter Buck of R.E.M. to Holly Black of Spiderwick Chronicles fame. Now teens can have their world rocked, too!
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  • Pretty Monsters: Stories
    Pretty Monsters: Stories  

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Readers as yet unfamiliar with Link (Magic for Beginners) will be excited to discover her singular voice in this collection of nine short stories, her first book for young adults. The first entry, "The Wrong Grave," immediately demonstrates her rare talents: a deadpan narration that conceals the author's metafictional sleight-of-hand ("Miles had always been impulsive. I think you should know that right up front"); subjects that range from absurd to mundane, all observed with equidistant irony. Miles, hoping to recover the poems he's buried with his dead girlfriend, digs up what appears to be the wrong corpse ("It's a mistake anyone could make," interjects the narrator), who regains life and visits her mother, a lapsed Buddhist ("Mrs. Baldwin had taken her Buddhism very seriously, once, before substitute teaching had knocked it out of her'). Other stories have more overtly magical or intertextual themes; in each, Link's peppering of her prose with random associations dislocates readers from the ordinary. With a quirky, fairytale style evocative of Neil Gaiman, the author mingles the grotesque and the ethereal to make magic on the page. Ages 12-up. (Oct.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Booklist
Link defies expectations . . . Her conception of fantasy is so unique . . . [and the] dedicated deadpan delivery . . . drives home how funny she can be, no matter how dark the material gets. (Starred review)
VOYA - Ann Welton
The close ties among fantasy, science fiction, and horror have rarely been more clearly laid out than in this fine short story collection by a writer possessed of both humor and imagination. The intricate tales cover wide turf, from the title story (a tale within a tale within a tale, all having to do with werewolves) to the wonderful The Wizards of Perfil, a straightforward fantasy, which like the equally impressive The Constable of Abal shows the author's debt to Diana Wynne Jones. The Surfer combines science fiction, love, and an engaging soccer-playing protagonist to look at what an alien invasion might actually mean. Link's command of voice ranges easily from the matter-of-fact to the eerie with equal believability, and her world building is done economically yet thoroughly. Throughout the stories, her piquant sense of humor takes the most frightening of situations and leavens them with laughter. Give this excellent collection to sophisticated readers who like their stories complex and with a slight puzzle aspect to them. That several of her tals echo the visionary tones of Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges does credit to both authors. Reviewer: Ann Welton
School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up

In her first collection of stories for young adults, Link upends traditional horror, science fiction, and fantasy motifs, creating original, quirky, and distinctly beautiful literary landscapes. Honed, brilliant language renders blood, werewolves, ghosts, magic, and monsters sublime-at times even funny. Readers will relish uncertainty in these savory, strange stories and never feel quite sure of their footing. They proceed giddily, jumping from one uncanny premise, phrase, or image to the next, eventually stumbling upon a revelation that hits them like the snap of a rubber band. Clever resolutions and tricky plots place teens on delightfully circuitous reading paths. Unexpected endings force them to double back and reconsider each story from the beginning. In this second read, young adults might notice Link's seamless incorporation of their own experiences. Awkward adolescence, uncomfortable first love, frustrating parents, and complicated friendships surface quietly amid wonderfully knotty, twisted plots and incandescent imagery. This compilation of intricate, transfixing selections succeeds in making the weird wonderful and the grotesque absolutely gorgeous.-Shelley Huntington, New York Public Library

Kirkus Reviews

Although some of Link's work appears in other YA and adult short-story anthologies, this is her first collection wholly aimed at a young-adult audience. Weirdly wonderful and a touch macabre, the nine short stories take readers into worlds with elements of reality but also supply a fantastic twist. The opening story, "The Wrong Grave," plays into the current trend of books featuring the dead and the undead; in it, a boy whose girlfriend dies wants to dig her up to retrieve the poems he put in her coffin. "Magic for Beginners" centers on a boy whose closest friendships form around a TV show with a loyal following but no set broadcast time or channel. Erudite, economical word choices give readers a strong sense of setting without drowning them in adjectives. The humor is dry and the characters are easy to relate to, even in alien (literally and figuratively) settings. Fantasy readers used to long, single tomes may hesitate at the short-story format, but once they see these, they will want more. (Fantasy/short stories. 14 & up)

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780670010905
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
  • Publication date: 10/2/2008
  • Pages: 400
  • Age range: 12 years
  • Lexile: 740L (what's this?)
  • Product dimensions: 6.30 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Kelly Link lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press and publish the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (www.lcrw.net).
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Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5
( 12 )
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Sort by: Showing 1 – 18 of 16 Customer Reviews

  • Posted November 29, 2008

    I Also Recommend:

    Stranger Things Happen: Stories
    Magic for Beginners
    The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows
    The Living Dead

    Litte stories that make you see a different side of the world

    This book was really enjoyable because of the reality of the stories told.<BR/>in this book there are many stories regarding zombies, vampires, werewolves and other phenomenons that will just blow your mind. This book will leave you wonderign whether something unnatural can exist in the world.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted August 29, 2012

    Love it

    I quite like this book. Mostsy for its odd writing style and twist endingd,my two favorite things about a book.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted July 16, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    Reviewed by Breanna F. for TeensReadToo.com

    PRETTY MONSTERS is a collection of nine short stories; all of which were quite interesting. Here is a sentence or two about each story...

    1. The Wrong Grave - Miles Sperry decides to dig up his dead girlfriend, Bethany Baldwin, to get back some poetry that he wrote for her after she died and wasn't smart enough to make copies of. When he opens the grave, he has discovered that it is the wrong one. Now he's got some strange dead girl following him around all night.

    2. The Wizards of Perfil - This is about a boy named Onion and a girl named Halsa. Onion's parents have died and Halsa's mother is watching after him and the other children. While in the market of Perfil, she sells Onion to someone who says they will take him to the Wizards of Perfil. For some reason, they bring Onion right back and take Halsa instead. Once Halsa is there, she discovers that the Wizards are incredibly vain and super lazy. But there is something that neither Onion or Halsa knows about the wizards.

    3. Magic for Beginners - A boy named Jeremy Mars and a few of his friends are obsessed with a show called The Library. Jeremy's mother and father have some problems getting along because Jeremy's father is a writer. When his father puts Jeremy in one of his books and then kills him off, his mother insists that she and Jeremy go to Las Vegas to see the wedding chapel she has inherited from her late sister. But Jeremy is afraid that he'll miss the next spontaneous episode of The Library!

    4. The Faery Handbag - Genevieve's grandmother, Zofia, has a mysterious handbag that is apparently a family heirloom and over 200 years old. She never lets the bag out of her sight. Zofia tells Genevieve crazy stories about how a whole little village lives in that bag, and a nasty dog, too. If you open it up and aren't careful, you could get sucked into the handbag and not come out for years, even if you are only in the bag for one day. When Zofia dies, Genevieve is to be the keeper of the bag, but once Zofia is gone Genevieve can't find the handbag anywhere.

    5. The Specialist's Hat - Samantha and Claire are identical twins who live with their father on the second story of a huge house. Their father is writing the history of the Eight Chimneys where they are currently living. Samantha and Claire have a babysitter who tells them about The Specialist, who apparently goes around the house killing people and that she herself used to live there and has seen The Specialist when she was younger. Things get a little creepy when The Specialist himself shows up that night.

    6. Monster - Bungalow 6 has to go on their campout before camp ends for the summer. It's pouring out but they still want to go. The boys from Bungalow 4 say they saw a monster and they are determined to see it. James Lorbick is kind of the loser of the cabin, and Bryan Jones dares him to put on a dress once they've set up camp. He puts it on and ends up wearing it most of the night. When their counselor, Terence, goes down the hill to help out a female camper, the monster shows up...

    7. The Surfer - Dorn is kidnapped by his father and taken to Costa Rica to see the elusive Hans Bliss, who was picked up by aliens years before and was told that they would come back to Earth some day. After landing in Costa Rica, they are quarantined because of the flu pandemic that has been killing for quite some time now....

    Read the full review at TeensReadToo.com

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  • Posted October 1, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    biggest waste of time for me so far this year

    this was the sorriest collection of short stories i have ever had the misfortune of reading. i read at least 3 novels a week every week and this is the worst so ive read so far. Im not sure if this is an accurate sample of the authors writing or if this is just all short story shes written combined in under one cover, either way it sucked. and oh man it sucked hard. ive had to read this book slowly bc after almost every short story ive wanted to toss it across the room, but im no quitter so i promise to keep pushin the next day. i know im no professional critic im only an avid reader, but this author has talent she just sucks at story writing, the ending are so sucky and crap worthy that it negates the well written story that preceded it. im sorry but if this book IS the author than they get a big D+ from me.

    0 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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