Girl in the Flammable Skirt, by Aimee Bender
This is as entertaining a collection of stories as any, and one of them is enough to get you hooked (or ought to be, anyway). The title is catchy—it’s what caught my attention—but is also interesting for the fact that the eponymous story is possibly the weakest in the collection. Which is to say that it’s quite good, but not brilliant. Good stuff. What’s to say? A fun, quirky mix of realism and fantasy, elements of the absurd and the totally expected mixed together expertly.