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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 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 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.
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Well this was an interesting novel. OSC has problems with the tone In the first 3 chapters, it seems really like a 50 year old white guy trying to be a 12 year old black boy in the ghetto. That coupled with the strangeness of the first 3 chapters, a guy loosing total control to a homeless guy. An entire chapter about a two boys walking to go find some place to smoke some weed, the conversation of two women in the neighborhood, and the conception and birth of a baby in less than an hour.
The book throws a whole lot of crazy at you at first, and then it all starts to make sense after that, OSC stops trying so hard and just writes, the story flows into you as each mystery is unfolded. All the magic in the world is revealed, he ties a lot of the fantastic fiction into this, focusing mostly around the fairies in a mid summers night dream.
It was an original look on old fables and very enjoyable. And it’s nice to see a story with an ending from OSC.