Magic for Unlucky Girls

The mundane and bizarre walk hand in hand—or sometimes run around, setting fire to everything in their path—in Balaskovits’s stories about girls and women thrust into strange circumstances. A mysterious unspeaking man with apparent superpowers becomes the hope of a city wracked by earthquakes in “Put Back Together Again.” The alchemist of “Suburban Alchemy” learns that being a master of the changeable art doesn’t mean he can cope with the changes in his tween daughter. A woman takes her ailing grandfather to Israel in search of an old family story that may be about her in “The Ibex Girl of Qumran.” The evils of strict religion and abuse lead a group of desperate girls to try to escape through a sacrifice in “Bloody Mary.” There isn’t a single tired trope here—in fact, there are few familiar elements at all—so readers looking for something askew from any fantasy they’ve read before will want to get to know the unlucky but determined girls of Balaskovits’s stories. (Apr.)