It's a Hardback Life

I received an ARC of this title from the publisher via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

I have spent entirely too much time trying to come up with an interesting way to talk about this book, but the longer my thinking drags on, the further I get away from my initial reactions to it. Instead of this useless procrastination, I’ll take the risk of sounding ridiculous and just go with whatever is bouncing around in my head.

Kelly Link has been on my reading radar for ages, but this is my first experience with her work. It is everything I hoped it would be, and more. Her work is most often described as magical realism, in that it fuses what we would call reality with things that we would probably not. The fusion allows Link to explore old themes in new and darkly funny ways. A girl who is ambivalent about her best friend steals her friend’s boyfriend, who just happens to be a robot and a ghost. An alcoholic deals with her issues by escaping to another universe on a bicycle. A group of astronauts tell ghost stories on board their vessel and things go…a bit weird.

That’s just it; the word for Get in Trouble is WEIRD. Not the weird we throw around in everyday conversation, but the older, grander version of the word that conjures up the uncanny and the supernatural. The seamless combination of real emotion and bizarre situations is a powerful way to let the juxtapositions highlight each other; the quotidian emotions of jealousy or loneliness or anger are infused with unreality and brought into sharper relief. When you get down to it, the scenarios border on speculative fiction rather than magical realism- they are larger and more alienating than the typical brief moments of strangeness that are the hallmark of writers like Laura Esquivel or Alice Hoffman.

Most of the characters in these stories are women, many of them young. The opening story, The Summer People, is my favorite. It follows a young girl in Appalachia whose moonshiner father has abandoned her to go find Jesus- and escape some roughnecks he owes money. He leaves her in charge of the summer people who are staying in a house nearby, but they aren’t your usual snowbird vacationers. I love how the story evoked the rural mountain setting and brought the uncanny details into focus so slowly that they feel perfectly natural and jarring at the same time. All of the stories contain different worlds, and each feels unique, but the trouble everyone seems to get into is pretty universal.

Cross-posted on Goodreads: Get in Trouble