Magic Street

by Orson Scott Card

Book Overview

"A modern suburban fantasy . . . There are quests and complications, conflicts and charms. . . . Card's back in top form, doing as well as or better than any of his fantasy work so far."--The San Diego Union-Tribune

In a prosperous African American neighborhood in Los Angeles, infant Mack Street is found abandoned in an overgrown park and taken in by a blunt-speaking single woman. Growing up, Mack senses that he is different...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345416902
• ISBN13: 9780345416902
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Random House Worlds
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A daring, bizarre, but hauntingly beautiful tale

Reading MAGIC STREET has just stirred a very interesting memory. A few years ago, controversy erupted in Canada over a docudrama made by a filmmaker of Caucasian background concerning the history of our First Nations citizens. From the news coverage of that event, I learned a new term: "cultural appropriation." Spokespeople for Aboriginal and First Nations communities questioned why a white person was telling the story of brown people, the inference being that no permission had been granted to mine someone else's culture for commercial purposes. Ironically, this only-in-Canada-eh? kind of incident has everything to do with middle class America's darling of innovative surreal fiction, Orson Scott Card. On the surface of things, Card is motherhood and apple pie personified, even in his forays to outer space. But his deeply held and authentically lived-out Mormon faith infuses even his most adventurous writing with a sincerity that far surpasses political correctness. Now why is this so important? It's because Caucasian-to-the-core Orson Scott Card has dared to explore what it might be like to live inside African-American skin. In telling the bizarre but hauntingly beautiful story of Mack, a contemporary urban Shakespearean changeling child and an even stranger power contest in Fairyland (yes, that's right...Fairyland!), Card enters the imaginative wealth of a culture he admittedly will never fully know. Several critically acclaimed short stories formed the run-up to the full-length book Card had planned for years but which, he admits in a thoughtful Acknowledgments essay, took him years to pull together. While he doesn't actually use the term, the spectral sin of "cultural appropriation" must have hung around in the author's consciousness like a subtle warning to get it right...or else! The compelling result shows he needn't have worried. What Card actually did with a real Black neighborhood and the fictitious people living there was to introduce a fantastical/dramatic element that may have been born from an Anglo-European psyche, but has come to embrace all humanity --- none other than the tales of the Bard himself. By turns, MAGIC STREET (the title being a conflation of the child-hero's name and his neighborhood) flits in and out of scenes taken straight from Shakespeare's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, with a dose of salacious subtext added for good measure. The power struggle between Titania and Oberon translates with startling immediacy into the sedate world of middle-class 21st-century Baldwin Hills, while winsome Puck of the original comedy behaves more like mischievous Black Peter who puts the coal in Dutch children's Christmas clogs. Card might have taken off-the-shelf literary and social components to create this latest in a long string of commercially successful novels, but the delight and daring of MAGIC STREET lie in its remarkable fusion of elements that do indeed magically change people's lives...from the inside out. It made me th

Magic Street is Card at his best

I have read much of Orson Scott Card's works -- his Ender series, some of the Seventh Son, the Lost Boys, and his women of Genesis. Of all these works, Magic Street most reminds me of Lost Boys -- a tale of suspense with moral implications. The story held my attention from beginning to end, with enough twists and turns to keep me from knowing the full story. I recommend it as a wonderful summer read!

A Midsummernight's dream brought to life

Depending what you like this may or may not be your favorite book by Orson Scott Card. Although I loved all of the Ender and Shadow novels best of all, I also loved the Sleeping Beauty retelling in Enchantment. Here OSC does for Shakespeare, what he did for Sleeping Beauty. This is a slower building story than most of his work, but in the end very rewarding. If you enjoy fantasy with a modern twist this is a book for you. If you enjoy exploring motives and motivation of human nature, this is a book for you. As always love, honor and responsibility are the primary themes of this story. Definitely worth a read!

It's all about the writing

I finally realized what I like about Card's writing - whether he's writing about Mack Street, Lovelock, or Ender Wiggin. Card's writing is so natural and smooth and clear that he can take you anywhere. His sentences are never clumsy and you just go along with the flow of his writing and his ideas and he takes you to places that logically make no sense. You go there because the verbal transitions are seamless. Magic Street is the story of Mack Street, a child born magically and left abandoned in a paper bag. It is also the story of Ceese, a kid of prodigious intelligence who is trying to resist the lure of bad influences and succeeds by taking on an awesome responsibility. It is also the story of Word (Wordsworth) Williams, who is forced to forget something and spends the rest of his life trying to find the truth and later spread the word. Finally, it is the story of how the desires and problems of a neighborhood interact and how the neighborhood finally bands together to confront those problems. Incidentally, the protagonists also discover a magical world and team up with Queen Mab to defeat the source of evil. I hope I've been cryptic enough about the storyline so as not to spoil it for you, as this is a lovely book.

One of his great ones

One of Card's great books. I've been a bit burned out on Card as he rode the gravy train WAY too far on the Ender series. Ender's game and Speaker were great and then started going downhill after that ... each one a little worse. Here, Card does again what he does best. Fiction with characters that are so true and real to life that it is very much believable. Few match Card for character development and believable relationships that are complex and real. I was rivited and this is one of those that I will read multiple times.