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An ill-used imagination conjures up some serious big-time baddies in this charming English import. It’s bad enough when your sister is the family do-gooder, but now she can perform magic as well? And not just any magic either, since Lucy now has the ability to invent any creature from scratch. When a magic wood behind their home grants Henry’s sister this awe-inspiring gift, he soon learns that she’s in danger from her own creations.

A cast of eccentrics and outsiders populates a collection set largely in coastal Ireland. In “You Can’t Call It That,” the final story in Hopkin’s (The Living Legend of St. Patrick, 1989, etc.) slim volume, the unnamed narrator says, “I believe the truth is made clearer if one tells lies. Even though you shouldn’t call fiction that. You can’t call it that. I believe in stories.

Think V.I. Warshawski butts too many heads in Chicago? Wait till you see what happens when she and her dog, Peppy, leave the big city for the wide-open spaces of Kansas.