Portable Childhoods

Starred review from December 31, 2007
Klages, whose debut novel, The Green Glass Sea
(2006), won the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, demonstrates both superior writing skill and a wide range in an impressive short story collection that defies easy categorization. The 16 selections, three of which are original to the volume, include moving mainstream tales of human relationships, such as the title story, about a mother and daughter, as well as fantasy and science fiction. The author is equally adept at short, twisty narratives that make the most of premises that could be gimmicks in lesser hands, like the recursive “Möbius, Stripped of a Muse.†This collection will linger in the memory long after reading, and should help garner a larger audience for Klages's forthcoming second novel.

April 1, 2007
Klages stories contain marvelssmall, strange things lurking on the edges of normal life. In the Nebula Awardwinning "Basement Magic," a cleaning lady and a little girl build a friendship around housework and magic. "In the House of the Seven Librarians," which closes the book, is a charmer about the unconventional upbringing of a child raised by feral librarians. Not all the stories are particularly concerned with childhood. In "Time Gypsies," a woman travels to the past to recover a paper on time travel that was never delivered and instead discovers the failures of history. Of course, the woman who was to deliver the paper is someone the traveler has admired and researched for years, and what transpires is a case of how meeting someone known only through secondhand sources can change all sorts of assumptions. Klages creates wonder-filled and beautiful worlds in her short stories, making this a tremendously satisfying collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)