A father who disciplines his daughter “looked as if he’d been sent all the bills in the world and couldn’t pay them.” A little girl “sounded small and strange, as if she lived in a fairy tale”; in fact she does live in a fairy tale, and by its rules, she is perfectly normal. In such lines, New Zealand’s Janet Frame crystallized whole lives, and her short stories, in turn, encapsulate much larger narratives. Frame’s characters are generally outsiders; they’re poor, ill, or disenfranchised by some perceived oddness. But they are not passive. Frame describes one woman as having “a kind of helplessness” in her eyes that “would change in a flash to defiance.” The two dozen works in Between My Father and the King (Counterpoint, $15.95) are stories of that flash. Frame (1924-2004) was institutionalized herself (saved from a lobotomy by winning a writing award) and she questions authority by showing how even those who have it—the rich, the doctors—are subject to fate’s reversals. Frame has tremendous empathy as well as imagination, and her brilliant portrayals of life from the perspectives of children and patients show how these marginalized individuals supplement their partial understanding of reality with dreams, myths, and stories, creating for themselves alternate realities that may collide with the accepted one, but that may also allow them to thrive.