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Wednesday, November 04, 2009
A Midsummer Night's Sequel?
Title: Magic Street
Author: Orson Scott Card
Bookmark: tag from a metal water bottle
Another weird one.
Mack Street is found as a baby by a young boy, then raised by the boy's neighbor, a nurse, who only lets Mack call her Miz Smitcher, like all the other neighborhood kids. As he grows up, he learns that when he has his "cold dreams," they come true--but they're other people's wishes. People who live near him and think they know what they want wish for these things, but their wishes get twisted, Monkey's Paw style, and show up in Mack's dreams as they are granted.
As Mack tries to understand the source or reason behind his dreams, he comes to find the very real magic in his own neighborhood, and a thin spot where our world gives way to a Fairy world. He learns the truth of his own origins, and how he is connected to Titania and Oberon, and how badly Mssr. Wm. Shakespeare botched their story. Then, naturally, a climactic final battle spanning two worlds simultaneously. Awesome.
However, despite a worm-dragon, near gang-rape, scary magical panthers, a megalomaniacal and extremely powerful fairy king, and a baby conceived and born in a matter of a couple hours, the scariest, most disturbing part of the book was in the acknowledgements. I was reading an Advance Reader Copy, whose back cover explicitly states that you are not to quote this copy without checking an actual release version, but I think that by stating that here (and the relative obscurity of our blog) covers me to quote that paragraph:
"I must also thank the 59, 729,952 people who voted for the re-election of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney, allowing me to sleep at night as I wrote the last five chapters of this novel."Labels: fairies, fantasy, Shakespeare, young protagonists
posted by reyn at
10:08 PM
1 Comments:
Wow, that really does top it all in terms of scariness.
11/18/2009 11:49 AM
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