"Engaging ... deeply charming, and its best scenes lodge in the reader's memory."--Washington Post
"Jennifer Stevenson's raunchy, funny, and disturbing first novel, Trash Sex Magic, is full of bewitching weirdness."--Chicago Reader
"Wonderful.... Trash Sex Magic can sweep you up and leave up dazzled, miles from home."--Locus
"Stevenson's first novel is at once sexy, beautifully written and passing strange."--Publishers Weekly
"Jennifer Stevenson's sparkling wit comes through in wordplay and metaphor, and her insight and unwavering attention to detail creates a prose as marvelous as the plot.... If you're looking for a fantasy that isn't quite dark, isn't quite urban, or if you're just looking for a funny, well-written trashy novel, this book is definitely for you. Surreal, and full of delightful weirdness, this has quickly become my most-recommended book of the year."--Green Man Review
"This just absolutely rocks. It's lyrical, it's weird and it's sexy in a very funky way."--Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
"A winning, touching, open-eyed love letter--but with trash, sex, and magic too. Unusual and wonderfully done."--John Crowley, The Translator
"It was a proverb of the 16th Century: On Hallowmass Eve troll notte thy broomstick bye ye caravan park, for thou wottist notte who maye mount thereon. I had paid it little heed since learning it years ago, and planned to read this grand book one chapter at a time. I'd scarcely begun the second when I fell under the author's spell."--Gene Wolfe, The Knight
"Ambitious, phantasmagorical, with images that burn into your brain and stay there, even when the book is off in a corner somewhere minding its own business."--Ellen Kushner, Thomas the Rhymer
"A springtime bacchanalia of beautiful, wild women, magic trees and sexy men--love it!"--Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads
Raedawn Somershoe shook her mother's shoulder. "Gelia! Wake up!" She jumped back as Gelia's fist swung out of the blankets. Cold March air blew in the trailer window, fluttering the edges of quilts stapled to the walls. "Mother! They're cutting down the tree across the road!"
"Whuh?"
"Right now! The machines are all there!" Through the window Rae heard a chainsaw cough. She flew back outside to the edge of the railroad tracks by the road.
There they were. A big yellow bulldozer and a little one like yesterday, churning up the mud they'd made of the meadow, and today a white trailer on a flatbed truck, a big hopper with ominous whirling blades in its mouth, and, reaching up to the top of their tree, a huge crane with a man in a bucket on top. He was draping ropes over the leafless upper limbs of the tree.
Rae hugged her own arms, cold with dread. "They're really going to do it," she whispered.
"'Course they are," her mother said, appearing beside her. "They had the sign up a month ago."
Rae rounded on her. "If you knew, why didn't you do something?"
"What could I do that he couldn't?" Gelia stood watching the men at work, looking closed-up and satisfied in that horrible way she had when bad things happened just as she said they would. She turned the look on Rae. "Well? You gonna stand here and watch? Let's get out of here."
She heaved two big laundry bags to her shoulders and stomped off toward Rimville.
The chainsaw coughed again. Rae heard a clatter as small branches sputtered away and fell. Her skin crawled. She ran to catch up with Gelia.
"What--how could--"
Gelia tossed one of the bags on the ground, put her head down, and walked faster. The chainsaw roared behind them. Rae snatched up the second laundry bag and followed.
Going be like that, is it. Gelia knowing stuff and not telling. Rae tried to wrap the laundry bag around her head so she couldn't hear the growl of the saw. Maybe she could march back there, fuck every one of those men if that was what it took, or lay hands on the machines so they'd break down or, awful thought, make the machines turn on the killers.
No. Even Gelia couldn't do that. Whatever had gone wrong, it was out of their hands. A sound came like machine-gun fire. They were feeding the little branches into the shredder.
She caught up with Gelia on the climb up the hill. "You knew? When they put up the sign? What--how can he die?"
Gelia turned so fast, her laundry bag almost knocked Rae down. "Be still."
"What's going to happen to us?"
All Gelia's teeth showed. "We're gonna be just peachy."
"Last night--I was with him--he's been so strange--"
"Be still!" Her mother looked ravaged.
"You never let me talk about him!" Rae cried.
Gelia slapped her hard across the face. "That's right. And now you never will." She picked up her laundry again and toiled on up the hill, her back bent as Rae had never seen it before.
Rae picked up her own bag and panted after her. That bad old numbness got hold of her, made her sick to her stomach, made the sky dark and turned her head to a block of wood. She marched like a little kid up the steep concrete street, each step impossibly small, past black lumps of old snow and grass trying to go green. Her cheek stung. She hated Gelia putting the silence on her. Hated it.
In the laundromat they sorted dirty clothes, avoiding accidental touches on the hand, tossing stuff onto each other's piles. They sat at opposite ends of the room with their magazines. Blindly Rae watched the wet laundry go round and round.
He couldn't die. She shut her eyes and reached out for him, feeling for the place inside that he had colonized.
Shock slapped her, a hundred times harder than Gelia's slap. She bounced against her plastic chair and her eyes flew open.
At the sorting table, Gelia smirked bitterly.
A moment later, the cement floor shook under her shoes. Boom. Rae trembled with the feel of change in the air.
Gelia flinched, but she never looked up.
The manager-repairman swaggered into the laundry. "Hey, baby," he said to Gelia. "I've missed ya. Stick around and watch the game tonight?"
Gelia ignored him.
"How 'bout you, Rae?" he said across the table.
Rae twitched, trying to smile. "That's awful nice of you, Dan." Dear god, somebody was having a normal day.
Gelia put her hand on his behind, and he turned his hey-baby grin back to her.
Boom. Rae and Gelia flinched together.
"I didn't say no yet, did I?" Gelia snapped, her eyes glittering. Gelia would be proving herself number one hussy on her deathbed.
"See you tonight, babe," Dan told Gelia and swaggered out.
Gelia met Rae's eyes across the table. There was something indescribably nasty in that look. Gelia had a secret, and she was angry with her daughter, and it would cost Rae dear to find out what it was.
Boom. Gelia turned away and began stuffing her load into a dryer. Rae stared out the window at a posse of yelling crows flying hell-for-leather eastbound over the trees, and waited for the next chunk to hit the ground.
"God dammit!" Gelia gave a childish shriek of rage. She twiddled the knob on the dryer and her fist hit the metal panel with a bang. For the first time Rae heard disbelief and loss in her mother's voice.
"God damn machine! It ate my lucky quarters!"
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