Get in Trouble – Kelly Link

I got so excited about the first story that I thought I’d struck genius. I found the other stories fabulously inventive, original and just a whole bunch of fun and dream logic let loose—Secret Identity and The Lesson are outstanding—but it was “The Summer People” that really got me. It’s the way the sassy but abandoned and put-upon girl protagonist presents the outlandish circumstance as if it’s tiresome (she has, in fact, had enough of it) that works so brilliantly well.
 
Kelly Link does this thing where she slips something utterly weird into the narrative while you’re not watching and makes out it’s perfectly normal. I adore this trick. She can also be very amusing and for that I, for one, am thankful. Misery is present in most people’s existence and serious fiction must deal with this reality, but it need not acquiesce in it and there has, also, to be an antidote.
 
Superheroes, a recurring theme, are presented as working people with a difficult job to do. “Sometimes you’ll be fighting somebody, this real asshole, and you’ll be both be getting winded, and then you start noticing his outfit and he’s looking, too, and then you’re both wondering if you got your outfits at this same place.”
 
And how about: “Werewolf Boyfriends go on and on about the environment, and also are always trying to get you to go running with them.”
 
And there are the mermaids, “an invasive species, like the iguanas. [….] they didn’t speak, only sang and whistled and made rude gestures”.