The Quick-Change Artist

<div> <p>In these stories of magic and memory clustered around a resort hotel in a small Virginia community Cary Holladay takes the reader on an excursion through the changes wrought by time on the community and its visitors. From the quiet of a rural forest to the rhythms of rock and roll <i>The Quick-Change Artist</i> is at once whimsical and hard-edged dizzying in its matter-of-fact delivery of the fantastic.</p> <p>Romance a sense of place and belonging and the supernatural-especially in the lives of children coming of age-offer windows into worlds beyond the ordinary throughout <i>The Quick-Change Artist</i>. In the title story a young chambermaid is in love with a foreign magician who performs at the hotel where she works. In Heaven set during the 1918 flu epidemic a struggling mother and son rely on the support of their fortune-telling plow horse. The narrator of Jane's Hat recalls a childhood enlivened by an unusual school principal and a friend who starts finding beauty everywhere.</p> <p>Horses and the people who love them wanderers and those who feed them creatures that disappear and those who search for them: these are stories with a constant heart.</p> </div>