The Free People's World-Tree Library

So the title story of Magic For Beginners is online for your reading pleasure. I'm taking a break from it to write this. You should go read it. I'm only on the second section of it, and I'm already thrilled with it. It's full of moments of surprising prettiness, and clever flourishes, and remarkable insights. The prose is sparkly, and lucid, and quick. I am not even joking, you really want to read this story.

Some things about the voice are reminding me of Aimee Bender, but they're not actually that similar. I guess what I mean by that is that the style is just very, very twenty-first century.

ETA: Representative sentence time!
"Once Jeremy had a dream that his father combined his two careers and began reupholstering giant spiders."
Wait, that was out of context and not particularly representative. Well, whatever; it obviously deserves post-space.

ETA: Okay, HERE'S a representative passage.

Jeremy thinks about how the two quietest people he knows are named Alice and Talis. But his mother and Talis are quiet in different ways. Jeremy's mother is the kind of person who seems to be keeping something hidden, something secret. Whereas Talis just is a secret. Jeremy's mother could easily turn out to be a secret agent. But Talis is the death ray or the key to immortality or whatever it is that secret agents have to keep secret.

ETA: Just finished it and it is grand.