Meeting the Dog Girls

Written by: Gay Terry

First line: There is no beginning, no end to the line, just women waiting.

Why you should read this book: The magical realism in this collection of speculative fiction turns its nose up at the merely implausible and flirts with surrealism each times it turns the corner: babies float from the sky, marshmallow fail to plug the hole in a man's heart, time loses all meaning. The worlds summoned here are full of the underprivileged —the offspring of coal country, the children of war, the poor of the inner city—wondering how to overcome their circumstances, and the borders between life and death, which are tangible, but permeable. Besides the eponymous Dog Girls, there are ghosts, aliens, thieves, spell casters, birds, statues, and fabric, all with surprising qualities, woven into tales that, if not always perfectly satisfying in the end, are all provocative.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Painfully bad editing. Rife with spelling mistakes. The writer apparently doesn't know the difference between "lose" and "loose" or "its" and "it's" or else doesn't care, and the editor, if such a person had anything to do with this book's publication, was apparently too afraid of witches to suggest any changes.