T is for Trash

Vicki of Reading At The Beach hosts A-Z Wednesday. Today’s letter is T.

I read this one in fall of 2008. It has to be one of the most unusual stories I’ve read. It’s beautifully written and I loved the characters. I guess it’s a mix between romance and fantasy at heart, all about sex and nature and choices people make that others just can’t understand. Awesome book!

Trash Sex Magic by Jennifer Stevenson

Sex is a force of nature.

A woman stood behind him—no, no mere woman: a bombshell, a vamp, a va-va-voom—a gypsy queen, a menace from Venus.

Raedawn Somershoe lives in a trailer on the banks of the Fox River. She likes men and men like her. It runs in the family: her mother, Gelia, can seduce a man just by walking across a road. When they set their sights on a man, something magical happens. Alexander Caebeau drives a bucketloader for a construction company. He’s lonely, homesick, tired of cutting down trees and putting up ugly buildings. He’d like to go back to the Bahamas, but his grandmother won’t let him come home. When Alexander met Raedawn Somershoe, something magical happened. Raedawn has just lost her lover. Her mother is keeping secrets from her, her childhood sweetheart is coming home, riverfront developers want Rae and her family gone. She may just be falling in love with Alexander Caebeau. And the Fox River is beginning to rise. . .something magical is about to happen. (Goodreads.com)

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. (Amazon.com)

The above is my honest opinion. I am an Amazon associate.