Magic America : Coming of Age in an Altered State
C.E. Medford
Author Bio
Born in Queens, NYC, C.E. Medford spent her adolescent years in New Jersey before moving to Brooklyn Heights. In Brooklyn, she attended several writing workshops taught by Greg Lichtenberg. In 2001 she moved to London, England where she later completed an M.A. with honours in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. She currently resides in London with her husband and son. Magic America is her first published novel.
Description
Hope lives in an alternative Trenton, New Jersey of the 1980s where radioactive cats, inherited tattoos, biker angels, cocky fairy godmothers and the determination to survive another day are all that stand between her family and the creeping chemical forces of LoboChem, a manufacturer willing to destroy all that is beautiful for the sake of a profit. Magic America is a story about coming of age in fluorescent, urbo-suburban, magic-realism America. Dust off your Wigwams and your high-tops, your banana clips and Aquanet, for a trip through the streets and skies of a Garden State where love triumphs over fear, faith is what you die with and family is who you ride with.
Book excerpt
The summer I was seven, a blue tree of heaven sprouted out of a crack in the crumbling wall of the old barrel yard and grew a foot a day. When the drainage pipes were laid between the canal and the new factory, my mother told me not to play down behind the park anymore. But a knot of tadpoles had hatched in the dredging pools, and I needed to keep an eye on them. A glance over my shoulder told me no one was watching and I slipped through the weeds to check the largest puddle. Mom didn’t understand that somebody had to watch. She didn’t get that if I took my eyes off that canal for even a single day, the barrel man could do anything he wanted.
I arrived to find the puddle empty. Disappointed, I patted the oily rainbows on the surface. The tadpoles were gone but one startled frog somersaulted into the mud on the far side. Its hop was quick but crooked and I pelted after it. It threw itself toward the canal with lopsided somersaults that sent it in an arc behind a tower of old tires. I caught up in time to see it smack into the trunk of the tree of heaven and fall dead, its soft green underbelly facing the stinking flowers. On the right side, above his big back leg, two front legs branched off the same joint. That frog was the barrel man’s doing. I knew his signature. One more entry for my hidden toxic warrior diary.
I was trying to figure out whether it was the right thing to pray for a five-legged frog when a breeze came up the canal, bothering the plants along the way. The shivering reeds snapped me out of my thoughts and I noticed how far behind the park I was. A creaking groan came from the barrel yard and every hair on me stood on end. I tried to peer through the ivy-tangled fences to see if anyone was there, but all I could see were the big drums stacked beyond.
When a second groan rose up I took off, tearing a path through the weeds until I burst onto the field below the playground. Two boys were throwing a Frisbee to a brown dog wearing a bandana. Not wanting to appear chicken, I walked along the edge of the field picking hitchhikers off my shorts like I didn’t have a care in the world. But I was listening to the weeds.
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Magic America: Coming of Age in an Altered State