Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories Book

This was a fairly fun anthology. Not the author's best work, but not her worst either.

Highlights:
-Nad and Dan adn Quaffy gets a mention because it's about a writer who . . . well, I can't explain it without giving away the story, but it was quite amusing. Not my favorite in the book, but it was fun.
-The Master is a thoroughly strange story, and rather creepy to boot, but interesting to read and try to puzzle out what's going on. I have certain suspicions about what happened after the story's end . . . I'm not sure whether or not to be glad there's no sequel.
-The Girl Who Loved the Sun is also interesting, and rather reminded me of a folktale. It was a bit sad- bittersweet, more like.
-No One is sci-fi, not fantasy, concerning a robot and a mechanized house (a la Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains"). It was not quite like anything I'd read before, though I suppose that could be because I haven't read much sci-fi.
-Little Dot was splendid. But I might be biased, since it had a great many cats in it and I'm rather fond of cats.
- Everard's Ride is a novella, and probably my favorite selection in the book. Another world within our own, a bit of a mystery, and a fair number of twists (only about half of which I guessed before they happened). And it didn't have a perfectly neat-and-tidy ending, which surprised me a bit- a lot of Mrs. Jones's stories do. (It actually boosted this book's rating by a star, all by itself.)

Lowlights:
-I'm not going to mention any specific stories in here, but I've noticed that quite a few of her short stories (in this and other books) follow a certain formula of "Beastly adult(s) introduced. Beastly adult(s) are steadily more and more beastly. Other adults are unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Child(ren) (likely precocious) must put up with beastly adult(s). Eventually, circumstances or the children themselves conspire with magic to humiliate or otherwise get rid of the beastly adult(s)." It's . . . not my favorite sort of story, let's put it that way.

Overall, though, this is a pretty fun collection. Worth a read if you're a Jones fan.