Octavia Butler meets Neil Gaiman in a tale about running from your past and hiding from your future.
The Water Wars have scrambled the world. Flood refugees are on the run. Disruptors and the Nostalgia Militia roam the roads wreaking havoc. Invisible Darknet lords troll the internet solidifying their power, while Cinnamon her three Circus-Bots, and two dogs, work with a community of Farmers, Motor Fairies and Wheel-Wizards to provide housing, healthcare and education for flood refugees.
Slipping into periodic despair, Cinnamon's been hiding out. She's ready to ditch the Next World Festival she runs--a sci-fi carnival jam featuring music, dance, masked revelers, drum circles and storytellers in a grassy amphitheatre on the farm she inherited. Her elders haunt her, insisting she do the Festival no matter what.
As she confronts threats to the life she's attempting to live from the Darknet Lords and the Nostalgia Militia, Cinnamon must determine how best to honor her elders and her history, while building a future for herself and her charges.
It's not going to be easy.
Andrea Hairston’s historical fantasy Will Do Magic for Small Change presents a tale of alien science and earthbound magic and the secrets families keep from each other.
Cinnamon Jones dreams of stepping on stage and acting her heart out like her famous grandparents, Redwood and Wildfire, but she’s always been theatrically challenged. That won’t necessarily stop her! But her family life is a tangle of mysteries and secrets, and nobody is telling her the whole truth.
Before her brother died, he gave Cinnamon The Chronicles of the Great Wanderer—a tale of a Dahomean warrior woman and an alien from another dimension who perform at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Theirs is a story of magic and alien science, but the connection to Cinnamon’s past is unmistakable.
When an act of violence wounds her family, Cinnamon and her theatre squad determine to solve the mysteries and bring her worlds crashing together.
Andrea Hairston's Redwood and Wildfire features blues singers, filmmakers, haints, healers, romance, and magic from Georgia to Chicago!
At the turn of the 20th century, minstrel shows transform into vaudeville, which slides into moving pictures. Hunkering together in dark theatres, diverse audiences marvel at flickering images. This 'dreaming in public' becomes common culture and part of what transforms immigrants and 'native' born into Americans.
Redwood, an African American woman, and Aidan, a Seminole Irish man, journey from Georgia to Chicago, from haunted swampland to a 'city of the future.' They are gifted performers and hoodoo conjurors, struggling to call up the wondrous world they imagine, not just on stage and screen, but on city streets, in front parlors, in wounded hearts. The power of hoodoo is the power of the community that believes in its capacities to heal and determine the course of today and tomorrow.
Award-winning author Andrea Hairston weaves together African folktales and postcolonial literature into unforgettable fantasy in Master of Poisons
The world is changing. Poison desert eats good farmland. Once-sweet water turns foul. The wind blows sand and sadness across the Empire. To get caught in a storm is death. To live and do nothing is death. There is magic in the world, but good conjure is hard to find.
Djola, righthand man and spymaster of the lord of the Arkhysian Empire, is desperately trying to save his adopted homeland, even in exile.
Awa, a young woman training to be a powerful griot, tests the limits of her knowledge and comes into her own in a world of sorcery, floating cities, kindly beasts, and uncertain men.
Awash in the rhythms of folklore and storytelling and rich with Hairston's characteristic lush prose, Master of Poisons is epic fantasy that will bleed your mind with its turns of phrase and leave you aching for the world it burns into being.
A Macmillan Audio production from Tor.com
