The QuickChange Artist Stories Author:Cary Holladay 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, The Quick-Change Artist is at once whimsical and hard-edged, d... more »izzying in its matter-of-fact delivery of the fantastic. 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 The Quick-Change Artist. 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. 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.« less