Will Do Magic for Small Change edition by Andrea Hairston Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : Will Do Magic for Small Change edition by Andrea Hairston Literature Fiction eBooks 
Cinnamon Jones dreams of stepping on stage and acting her heart out like her famous grandparents, Redwood and Wildfire. But at 5’10’’ and 180 pounds, she’s theatrically challenged. Her family life is a tangle of mystery and deadly secrets, and nobody is telling Cinnamon the whole truth. Before her older 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 in Paris and at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The Chronicles may be magic or alien science, but the story is definitely connected to Cinnamon’s family secrets. When an act of violence wounds her family, Cinnamon and her theatre squad determine to solve the mysteries and bring her worlds together.
Will Do Magic for Small Change edition by Andrea Hairston Literature Fiction eBooks
The blurb on this book not only does not do it justice, I hope it does not discourage anyone from reading it.The story is told in part from the viewpoint of a young girl, but it's definitely not a young adult book. Far from it. Good new science fiction is rare these days, and good new fantasy is almost nonexistent. Both genres today have come to be defined by interminable series that don't have enough interesting characters or imagination in ten volumes to justify a decent short story. In the midst of this literary desert, Andrea Hairston's Will Do Magic for Small Change is like an oasis abounding with life and a cave of treasure rolled into one (Actually a cave figures prominently in one early scene, but the novel also ranges through jungles, deserts, the ocean and the great cities, not to mention the depths of time and space). This book is not conventional fiction of any kind and it certainly defies labeling as fantasy or science fiction. Shakespeare and Dickens are in here jamming with Cordwainer Smith, Ursula LeGuin and Ishmael Reed, to mention just a few. Andrea Hairston draws on deep springs of mythology, of history, of literature and of understanding of humanity in all its diversity. I'm going to buy this book and put it on the shelf with books I come back to year after year.Product details
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Will Do Magic for Small Change edition by Andrea Hairston Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
This is a warm and magical book. Like Hairston’s other novels (Mindscape, Redwood and Wildfire), it opens with a death—actually two, since there are two plots that make up the novel’s contrasting stories. The first is the death, by an overdose, of the adolescent Cinnamon’s brother Sekou, in the gritty lower-class world of 1987 Pittsburgh. The second is the death of Taiwo, the brother of Kahinde, one of the women warriors of the African kingdom of Dahomy in 1892, as the state falls before a colonizing French army. (There was indeed a kingdom of Dahomy in the area of West Africa now occupied by modern Benin, famous for its “” warriors.) The two plots are linked by the figure of the Wanderer, a being from another dimension, who is “born” in the sense of coming to human consciousness at the time that Taiwo dies, and who joins Kahinde and survives for the century between the two stories.
As in Hairston’s other books, the reader (like the Wanderer) is thrown into the action and only gradually sorts out what’s going on. Despite their opening symmetries, the intertwined plots seem at first confusingly unlike one another. Kahinde and the Wanderer are in almost constant motion, often on the run, as they journey from Africa to Paris and eventually to Chicago, looking for a home. Cinnamon’s is an inner journey and she stays in history; the largest action she takes (it turns out to be large) is to journey across the city. The major figures of Kahinde’s story are adults (although the Wanderer’s initial experience of the world is almost as fragmented as a newborn child’s), while Cinnamon’s story primarily concerns the young and the old. Cinnamon forms an intense friendship with two people her own age, and her major supports are her grandparents. These are Redwood and Aiden Wildfire, the protagonists of Hairston’s earlier novel who, with Redwood’s younger sister Iris, have grown old but remain indomitable. Redwood still has her storm hand, which she puts to good use, and Aiden has his banjo.
Yet the two plots turn out to share fundamental patterns. Both are about personal integration—quite literally in the case of the Wanderer, whose other-dimensional nature tends to make him scatter into the void. But all the major characters need to accept their own demons. Both stories follow the creation of extended families Kahinde and the Wanderer gradually pick up others as they journey to Chicago, while Cinnamon, isolated at the start, makes her own connections, in part through a theatrical performance, and in part by daring to admit her secrets and share her pain. While there is some sex in the stories, the deepest love in the novel is familial. In both plots theatre is central, at once transformative and a con. Once she can no longer be an warrior, Kahinde fights her battles for gaping audiences. As in Redwood and Wildfire, the inauthenticity of performing your ethnic identity and encouraging stereotypes comes up for consideration. Both plots focus on telling stories as a way of knowing yourself and making a community—and as a means of immortality. Cinnamon opens the novel saying “Books let dead people talk to us from the grave.”
This is an extraordinarily rich novel, which concerns itself with, among other matters, with race, gender, and the transforming imagination. It doesn’t leave much unscrutinized. The kingdom of Dahomy, which might be the subject of nostalgic idealization, turns out to have preyed on neighboring kingdoms, recruiting its s in part from girls whose parents have been murdered. A French doctor does much good for the African community he lives in, and is also a serial abuser of women. Kahinde kills him. On the other hand Hairston works to see her characters in the round, and several who start out looking like satiric negative stereotypes turn out to have unexpected goodness.
If there is a lot of death in this novel, it’s also full of comic warmth. There were many scenes, especially in the Cinnamon plot, which made me laugh with the kind of glee you feel for characters you really like. There’s plenty of literal magic in the book—although Cinnamon’s brother Sekou is dead, he continues to talk to her and her friends. And, as in Redwood and Wildfire, there’s a nimbus of hoodoo that appears suddenly around characters and reshapes ordinary events. The uncertainty about what will—or can—happen is part of novel’s meaning however grim the limits seem to be, we can’t know what’s possible until we’ve tried it. In part the novel is simply about the wonder of life in the world, however uncertain and brutal it can be—a wonder that the Wanderer, whose account of Kehinde’s story forms half the novel, feels constantly.
Throughout, as usual, Hairston uses language masterfully—colloquial phrasing that has the metaphoric power of poetry. “Cut your chains and you become free; cut your roots and you die.” “We make the real world, every minute, with every breath.” The title sums up the contrasts in the book. The Wanderer, in 1987 seemingly a homeless derelict, meets Cinnamon and guides her away from a dangerous fall, saying, “I do magic for small change.” Hairston adds, “He was blurry and then sharp as a spotlight.”
Will Do Magic for Small Change feels like Octavia Butler crossed with Charles de Lint. It genres, with aliens and magic, and explores themes such as race, gender, sexuality, and family history. It’s one of the most original SFF novels I’ve read in years.
Will Do Magic for Small Change opens with Cinnamon Jones, a black girl in 1980’s Philadelphia, attending her half-brother’s funeral. Her brother left her a book written by an alien wanderer from another dimension who appeared in West Africa during the 1890’s. The wanderer’s story is not complete and more sections continue to appear as the course of Cinnamon’s teen years. Eventually, Cinnamon realizes that the wanderer’s story has some mysterious connections to her own family history.
My expectation was that I would enjoy the alien’s story more than Cinnamon’s, but the reverse was true. Cinnamon aspires to be an actress, but the theater is a difficult place for a large, dark skinned black girl. It does provide the opportunity of friendship with two other teenagers, and the three of them become caught up in the mysteries of the Chronicle.
That said, I never skipped over the other sections relating to the wanderer (Taiwo), who gets caught up in the life of a warrior woman of Dahomey, Kehinde, who is searching for her dead brother’s wife and an escape from her own past. New sections of Taiwo and Kehinde’s story appear as the wanderer remembers them, but they’ve fragmented and lost many portions of their own history
Gender and sexual fluidity are at the heart of Will Do Magic for Small Change. Cinnamon is bisexual (although the word is never used) and becomes involved in a fledgling polyamorous romance. The wanderer, Taiwo, is not male or female, but either both or neither. They, like Cinnamon, are bisexual, and various characters they encounter are also queer.
In a large part, Will Do Magic for Small Change is a story of identity and history, with Taiwo trying to form their own identity and recall their personal history. Meanwhile, Cinnamon is searching into her own family history, trying to uncover the truth of the event that led to her father’s coma, and still in the process of self discovery. There’s a sense of searching for a connection between an African American present and an African past.
For me, the characters are what I found most compelling about Will Do Magic for Small Change. I became strongly invested in Cinnamon’s story, and I loved Kehinde, a fierce warrior woman who continues to move forward despite the tragedies in her past. Even characters such as Opal, Cinnamon’s mother, who could have been little more than a two dimensional obstacle for Cinnamon to overcome ultimately proved to be more than that.
SPOILER. If I have one complaint, it lies with the ending. The book ends suddenly and abruptly, without any real conclusion or closure. I’m guessing that there’s some thematic or literary purpose, but I read for entertainment and this didn’t work for me. I’m willing to go with such experimentation in form, but I’m not willing to invest the time in a 400 page + book only for an ending reminiscent of “The Lady or the Tiger?” END SPOILER.
That being said, I’m still planning on reading more by Andrea Hairston. The level of quality and imagination she displays here is such that I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to read more. I believe there’s another book about Cinnamon’s grandparents, and I hope to get my hands on it soon.
The blurb on this book not only does not do it justice, I hope it does not discourage anyone from reading it.The story is told in part from the viewpoint of a young girl, but it's definitely not a young adult book. Far from it. Good new science fiction is rare these days, and good new fantasy is almost nonexistent. Both genres today have come to be defined by interminable series that don't have enough interesting characters or imagination in ten volumes to justify a decent short story. In the midst of this literary desert, Andrea Hairston's Will Do Magic for Small Change is like an oasis abounding with life and a cave of treasure rolled into one (Actually a cave figures prominently in one early scene, but the novel also ranges through jungles, deserts, the ocean and the great cities, not to mention the depths of time and space). This book is not conventional fiction of any kind and it certainly defies labeling as fantasy or science fiction. Shakespeare and Dickens are in here jamming with Cordwainer Smith, Ursula LeGuin and Ishmael Reed, to mention just a few. Andrea Hairston draws on deep springs of mythology, of history, of literature and of understanding of humanity in all its diversity. I'm going to buy this book and put it on the shelf with books I come back to year after year.
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