Magic Street

Magic Street

Orson Scott Card has the distinction of having swept both the Hugo and Nebula awards in two consecutive years with his amazing novels Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. For a body of work that ranges from science fiction to nonfiction to plays, Card has been recognized as an author who provides vivid, colorful glimpses between the world we know and worlds we can only imagine. In a peaceful, prosperous African American neighborhood in Los Angeles, Mack Street is a mystery child who has somehow found a home. Discovered abandoned in an overgrown park, raised by a blunt-speaking single woman, Mack comes and goes from family to family–a boy who is at once surrounded by boisterous characters and deeply alone. But while Mack senses that he is different from most, and knows that he has strange powers, he cannot possibly understand how unusual he is until the day he sees, in a thin slice of space, a narrow house. Beyond it is a backyard–and an entryway into an extraordinary world stretching off into an exotic distance of geography, history, and magic. Passing through the skinny house that no one else can see, Mack is plunged into a realm where time and reality are skewed, a place where what Mack does and sees seem to have strange affects in the “real world” of concrete, cars, commerce, and conflict. Growing into a tall, powerful young man, pursuing a forbidden relationship, and using Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night Dream as a guide into the vast, timeless fantasy world, Mack becomes a player in an epic drama. Understanding this drama is Mack’s challenge. His reward, if he can survive the trip, is discovering not only who he really is . . . but why he exists. Both a novel of constantly surprising entertainment and a tale of breathtaking literary power, Magic Street is a masterwork from a supremely gifted, utterly original American writer–a novel that uses realism and fantasy to delight, challenge, and satisfy on the most profound levels. One day, ultra-fastidious Byron Williams gives a grimy, bag-bedizened bum a lift in his immaculate Mercedes. Weird? Not half, compared to what awaits Byron: his wife, Nadine, in labor--and only the bum seems to have known she was pregnant. When an abnormally small boy is born, the bum reappears, bags the newborn, and splits. Afterward, Nadine remembers nothing of the experience. Ceese Tucker, 12, discovers the baby in the bag, resists very strange urges to destroy it, and gets single neighbor Ura Lee Smitcher to adopt. Ceese becomes informal big brother to the baby, dubbed Mack Street, who grows into a loner who walks the neighborhood day and night, cherished by all. Early on, Mack realizes that he can dream others' fondest wishes until they come true; but if he does, they turn on their wishers, so that, for example, a young swimmer who wishes she were a fish is found inside a water bed, permanently brain damaged from oxygen starvation. At 13, Mack breaches Fairyland via a house that only he can see; four years on, he becomes the focal figure in a battle of good and evil that impinges on fairy and human realms alike. Responding to a black friend's challenge to create a black hero, and inspired by Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream , Card has constructed a suspenseful fantasy thriller that, during the race to the last page, has one mulling over myth, morals, salvation, and will. Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Praise for Orson Scott Card’s Enchantment “Card is a powerful storyteller.” –Los Angeles Times “[His] prose is a model of narrative clarity; the author never says more than is needed or arbitrarily withholds information, yet even a simple declarative sentence carries a delicious hint of further revelation.” –The New York Times “The best writer science fiction has to offer.” –The Houston Post “Card is skilled at pacing and good with an action scene, but he has raised to a fine art the creation of suspense by ethical dilemma, and in doing so has raised his work to a high plane.” –Chicago Sun-Times Orson Scott Card burst on the scene in the early 1980s as a short-story writer, whose highly praised work appeared frequently in Omni and other magazines. He is the award-winning author of Enchantment, Ender’s Game, and the Alvin Maker series, among other novels. Card lives with his family in Greensboro, North Carolina. Bag Man The old man was walking along the side of the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica, gripping a fistful of plastic grocery bags. His salt-and-pepper hair was filthy and hanging in that sagging parody of a Rastafarian hairdo that most homeless men seem to get, white or black. He wore a once-khaki jacket stained with oil and dirt and grass and faded with sunlight. His hands were covered with gardening gloves. Dr. Byron Williams passed him in his vintage Town Car and then stopped at the light, waiting to turn left to go up the steep road from the PCH to Ocean Avenue. A motorcycle to the left of him gunned it