Portable Childhoods.

Klages, Ellen (author).

Klages’ stories contain marvels—small, strange things lurking on the edges of normal life. In the Nebula Award–winning “Basement Magic,” a cleaning lady and a little girl build a friendship around housework and magic. “In the House of the Seven Librarians,” which closes the book, is a charmer about the unconventional upbringing of a child raised by feral librarians. Not all the stories are particularly concerned with childhood. In “Time Gypsies,” a woman travels to the past to recover a paper on time travel that was never delivered and instead discovers the failures of history. Of course, the woman who was to deliver the paper is someone the traveler has admired and researched for years, and what transpires is a case of how meeting someone known only through secondhand sources can change all sorts of assumptions. Klages creates wonder-filled and beautiful worlds in her short stories, making this a tremendously satisfying collection.