More than one hundred years after surviving the deadly flood of 1900, the island of Galveston once again is threatened when reality comes face to face with a magic transforms the city, leaving it caught up in a seemingly endless Mardi Gras. Novels from fantasist Sean Stewart resemble icebergs: four-fifths of their content is hidden, adding psychological mass that is felt, even if not seen. His seventh novel is his best yet. Galveston, Texas, is an island already rich in history and eccentric characters when, during Mardi Gras in the year 2004, sudden magic floods the streets. The world is changed--divided between the real city, where technology and its products become unreliable and scarce, and the city doomed to endless carnival, where it is always 2004 and there are still such wonders as cigarettes, cold beer, and aspirin. Twenty years later, three major figures hold the city in precarious balance: Momus, the king of carnival and god of magic; Jane Gardner, ex-lawyer and unofficial mayor, fighting to maintain essential services in the real city; and Odessa, angel and arbiter. When Gardner develops Lou Gehrig's disease, her daughter, Sloane, strikes a desperate bargain with Momus, and the delicate balance is destroyed; cataclysmic change ensues. Stewart is at his considerable best when he focuses on character. He is able to make metaphor concrete using symbols that, in lesser hands, might be considered simplistic and clichéd. The author is less sure, however, when he attempts to paint a grander canvas: the hurricane towards the end of the book is not strictly necessary, and it flings the novel around a curve that it was perhaps not meant to follow. Despite this, the book has much to offer, with tips on poker, herbal medicine, and island survival to augment the powerful themes of loyalty and luck gliding beneath the surface. --Luc Duplessis The return of magic to the world at the dawn of the 21st century split the city of Galveston into two parallel worlds--a "normal" city of survivors and a perpetual Carnival town of magic-touched creatures. When Sloane Gardner discovers how to cross between the two Galvestons, she becomes a link between a father and son whose destinies hold the key to the survival of both worlds. Stewart's (Mockingbird) brand of magical realism combines psychological drama with otherworldly images to create a rich tapestry that lingers long after the end of the tale. For most fantasy or modern fiction collections. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. In Stewart's unusual postapocalypse novel, the big disaster is a "flood" of magic during Mardi Gras in 2004 that pretty much destroyed the technological infrastructures of cities. Since then, magic has become ever more potent. Protagonist Josh Cane, the son of a pharmacist and a medicine woman, is impoverished after his father loses the family home in a poker game. Josh dreams of being respectable again and of being able to court a certain girl. Meanwhile, the influx of magical influence has made the practice of medicine and related fields more uncertain than they already were. Politics, however, remains as intense as ever, as urban politics on the Gulf Coast attest, and not only intense but nasty in a thoroughly convincing way. Indeed, Stewart's urban fantasy is convincing straight through, thanks to superior command of the language, excellent characterization, and a plot full of novelties introduced without any sense of reaching for them. Stewart may not be Tolkein or LeGuin, but he has definitely mastered the art of the well-told tale. Roland Green This story of the redemption of two damaged personalities is set in Stewart's near-future (Night Watch, 1997, etc.) where, during Mardi Gras 2004, a tidal wave of magic inundated the world. On Galveston Island, part of the population was trapped forever in an everlasting, magical carnival; in the outside world, many died when the old order collapsed. To preserve the survivors amid the new magical ambiance, Jane Gardner arranged for the witch Odessa to banish to Mardi Gras anyone who became tainted with magic. But now old Jane is dying, so her daughter Sloaneshe doesn't want Jane's job, or Odessa's, eitherthinks to bargain with Lord Momus, the god/demon of Mardi Gras, to save her mother's life. Odessa helps Sloane make a mask that gives her a distinctive new personality and enables her to enter Mardi Gras when she puts it on. But, seduced by Mardi Gras, Sloane makes an imprecise bargain, and her mother dies. Sloane receives the news while visiting old acquaintance Josh, a surly and unpopular apothecary; immediately she puts on the mask and vanishes. Josh, however, is arrested, beaten and condemned for her murder. His punishment is exile to the cannibal-infested mainland. When a huge hurricane arrives, Momus releases Mardi Gras into the real world. Much of this moves to no discernible logic, either internal or external, but the vivid, sometimes brutal narrative and life-sized charac