Trash, Sex, Magic

June 7, 2004
There are some pretty weird things going on in the backwoods along the Fox River, just beyond Chicago's far-western suburbs. Twenty-four-year old Raedawn Somershoe and her mom Gelia are trailer trash, women of ill repute, who have worked their sexual wiles on many men in nearby Berne, Ill., not to mention any number of truckers and passing strangers. They live just outside of town with a variety of ill-sorted, half-feral family members and lovers and are mostly content with life. Then a corrupt developer decides that he wants their riverside property as the site for posh new townhouses and he won't take no for an answer. This turns out to be a mistake because the Somershoes have a powerful sexual magic, magic rooted deeply in the trees and the river, and the earth itself. Alexander Caebeau, a homesick Bahamian who runs heavy machinery for the construction company building the townhouses, quickly falls under Raedawn's spell. Then, after an enormous piece of construction machinery is found disassembled overnight, Caebeau is made night watchman and discovers that he has a marvelous and marvel-filled fate in store for him. Filled with oddly bent characters, lovingly detailed descriptions of the Illinois countryside, and just the right amount of magic, Stevenson's first novel is at once sexy, beautifully written and passing strange.

June 1, 2004
They squat in colonies on the banks of a river around which surburbs sprawl: slutty women with unmatched outfits and out-of-fashion hair, whose wild, truant children of curiously invisible fathers are brought up to be equally slutty and unfashionable. Trailer trash. Their decrepit mobile homes stand between the river and a luxurious new housing development. But that's not all that stands between the developers and their dreamed-of riches. For Raedawn Somershoe and her mother, Gelia, aren't just trampy and looking for quickies from the construction workers (though they " are" that, too). They are as close as a modern suburb can come to real elemental powers-- women who make love with the trees and the earth, as well as pretty much any human males they encounter. Hardly what environmentalists mean when they say "tree-hugger," the Somershoes are powerful allies in the natural world's attempt to survive urbanization, and they use sex as their most potent tactic. Vivid, strange, pulsing with life, this is an unforgettable debut by a promising author.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)