Get in Trouble

Multiple readers say Get in Trouble's dialogue and plotting feel deliberately vague, more interested in mood than in giving a throughline to follow, and a cluster of negative reviews call the prose mannered, one reader dismissing Kelly Link's style as a “horribly pretentious hipster in a fiction workshop.” 'The Lesson,' the one story with no fantastical element, splits readers hard: some call it the emotional anchor, others the weak link precisely because it breaks the collection's own premise. Several readers say they bounced off early, unable to orient inside a story before it was already over. At least one negative review rejects the book's reputation outright, faulting “wooden characters, laughably bad dialogue, idiotic details,” and dated technology references, listservs and MMORPGs, read as already aging to some.