Aimee Bender (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake) is back with a collection of stories filled with magical realism and imbued with the stuff of fairy tales.
There is something here for most every taste. If you prefer a straightforward story with a narrative arc and a conclusion, try "The Doctor and the Rabbi." The rabbi is a woman, teacherly and expressive; the doctor is a literalist by his own admission. Their conversation seems to be circular, going nowhere, but it most assuredly does. A discussion about prayer midway through this story is wonderful.
If you are willing to follow Bender into the mystical, there are several choices. "The Color Master" is a retelling of the first part of the Charles Perrault tale "Donkeyskin," which has echoes of "Cinderella." In this version, however, the king wants to marry his daughter. The tailors who create beautiful dresses for the princess finally encourage her to get away.
In "Tiger Mending," an expert seamstress is pressed into service to sew tigers back together when they appear bloodied and ragged; how they got that way is the crux of the story. "Lemonade" is a heartrending story about adolescent girls at a mall, set in Southern California at its bitchy best. "The Red Ribbon" has a wife negotiating a price with her husband for every sexual act and finding that she can't go back to an ordinary sex life.
In both style and content, Bender's stories are filled with fancy and mystery; some are fairy tales for grownups, some morality plays, all of them captivating and worth reading more than once. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.