THE GOOD EYE

Twelve smart, understated stories about uncanny and magical moments in everyday life.

In “Pest Control,” an animal psychic gets revenge on the woman who stole her boyfriend, while in “Linear A,” a woman on a Mediterranean cruise finds a carved stone in her pocket. Whether it’s a talisman or something she accidentally picked up at an archaeological site, the stone is clearly trying to tell her something about her bullying oaf of a boyfriend. In one funny moment, the boyfriend wakes up choking on the stone, which he’s somehow mistaken for a throat lozenge, and blames his girlfriend. Gibson, the daughter of Margaret Atwood, clearly shares her mother’s feminist bent, taking aim at male artists who assume credit for their girlfriends’ work (as in “Blue Circle”) or discourage the talented women in their lives from pursuing a creative practice (as in “Wild Food”). “The life of an artist is very hard,” Sebastian condescendingly tells his girlfriend after she shares her wholly original paintings with him. Of course, his arrogance also makes it impossible for him to see what his girlfriend is serving him and his arty friends for dinner. Often, the stories themselves perform surprising and original sleights of hand, starting with one character only to reveal that another is the real star: “Flip,” for example, begins with Jon, a huckster who runs a carnival, and Aiden, an amateur magician Jon hires to walk around in a panda suit, only to abruptly shift, or flip, to Willow, a young woman who tests one of Jon’s many pronouncements that “the real truth is that nobody is born lucky.” Though Gibson’s narrative cunning often pays off, in some other stories (like “Light Tricks” and “Cushion Cut”), characters are introduced only to disappear, and the stories seem to end before fully realizing their promise.

Well-mannered stories about women in the throes of rejecting convention and exercising all varieties of magic.