Magic Street

Magic Street is the Orson Scott Card novel that almost no one expected when it came out in 2005, and which I think holds up better than most of his late work. The setting is a Black middle-class neighborhood in suburban Los Angeles. The premise is that a 14-year-old boy named Mack discovers that the strange dreams he has been having are actually manifesting in the real world, and that an old man on his street is more than he appears.

Card is doing something genuinely difficult here, which is writing outside his own cultural background with respect rather than tourism. The neighborhood is rendered with the kind of attention Card has clearly put in the work for. The fantasy mechanics, drawn from West African folk-tradition rather than the European-medieval default, are interesting in their own right.

The book is uneven in places (the cosmology gets thicker than it probably needs to be) but the central friendship between Mack and the old man is one of the most affecting things Card wrote in this period.

Four stars. Recommended to readers who have written Card off based on his more polemical work, and to readers who like urban fantasy that takes its setting seriously.