Unabridged
The New York Times best-selling author of Ender's Game and the Alvin Maker series turns to contemporary fantasy in this luminous, magic-filled tale.
Orson Scott Card is one of science fiction and fantasy's most popular authors, acclaimed for his ability to bring to life believable, sympathetic characters and then invest their stories with powerful emotion. Now Card turns his creative skills to contemporary fantasy, in this involving story about a young man who finds himself dreaming his neighbors' dreams. Like Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, Magic Street is an evocative coming-of-age tale set in a neighborhood filled with magical promise.
Award-winning author Orson Scott Card has been recognized as a writer who provides vivid, colorful glimpses between the world we know and worlds we can only imagine.
Living 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 surrounded by boisterous characters and yet deeply alone. But while Mack senses that he is different from most and knows that he has strange powers, he cannot 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 in which time and reality are skewed, a place where what Mack does seems to have strange effects on the "real world" of concrete, cars, commerce, and conflict. Growing into a tall, powerful young man, pursuing a forbidden relationship, and using Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's 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. |
