{"product_id":"the-strange-adventures-of-rangergirl-isbn-9780553383386","title":"The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn this debut novel, acclaimed short-story author Tim Pratt delivers an exciting  heroine with a hidden talent—and a secret duty. Witty and suspenseful, here is a  contemporary love song to the West that was won and the myths that shape us. . . .\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As  night manager of Santa Cruz’s quirkiest coffeehouse, Marzi McCarty makes a mean espresso,  but her first love is making comics. Her claim to fame: The Strange Adventures of  Rangergirl, a cowpunk neo-western yarn. Striding through an urban frontier peopled  by Marzi’s wild imagination, Rangergirl doles out her own brand of justice. But lately  Marzi’s imagination seems to be altering her reality. She’s seeing the world through  Rangergirl’s eyes—literally—complete with her deadly nemesis, the Outlaw.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It all  started when Marzi opened a hidden door in the coffeehouse storage room. There, imprisoned  among the supplies, she saw the face of something unknown . . . and dangerous. And she  unwittingly became its guard. But some primal darkness must’ve escaped, because Marzi  hasn’t been the same since. And neither have her customers, who are acting downright  apocalyptic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Now it’s up to Marzi to stop this supervillainous superforce that’s  swaggered its way into her world. For Marzi, it’s the showdown of her life. For  Rangergirl, it’s just another day. . . .\"Tim Pratt's The Strange Adventures of Ranger Girl is a two-fisted meta-fiction of old west mythos and modern day -- sharp writing, cool characters, fascinating ideas, and the courage to have fun.  Readers of comics and classics and both will enjoy this novel.\"  -Jeffrey Ford, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Rangergirl is a fine blend of imaginative and engaging -- a tale well-told.\" --Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing and author of \u003ci\u003eSomeone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Quirky and fun.\"-\u003ci\u003e-Rocky Mountain News\u003c\/i\u003eTim Pratt has been nominated for the Nebula award and for the Campbell Best New Writer award, and his fiction has appeared in \u003ci\u003eBest American Short Stories\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Year's Best Fantasy and Horror\u003c\/i\u003e.  He lives in Oakland, California, where he co-edits a literary 'zine, Flytrap, with his fiancee, Heather Shaw.Skull Cracker\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Marzi leaned on the counter and watched, with dread twisting in her belly  like a knot of rattlesnakes, as Beej trudged up the stairs. The worst of  the morning rush was over and Hendrix was in the back watching his  thirteen-inch portable TV, so Marzi would have to wait on Beej herself. He  was talking to himself   in a dreamily pleasant tone, which was somehow worse than mere ranting,  and Marzi heard her own name several times in his otherwise  incomprehensible monologue. Beej had always been a slob, but his hygiene  and dress sense had deteriorated completely over the past few weeks. His  carrot orange hair hung in greasy clumps around his face, and his  ever-present black leather jacket—which must have been stifling in this  heat—was smeared with mud and bits of grass. Marzi wondered if he’d lost  his apartment or something; if he was sleeping outside.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Beej still came into the café every day, and Lindsay said he was still  attending art classes, but clearly something had come catastrophically  loose in his life. Marzi had seen heroin addiction in action, and it  looked something like this, but she didn’t think drugs were Beej’s  problem. Something in his eyes, the way they seemed to roll around loose  lately, made her think he was having problems inside his head.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Beej clumped up to the counter, grinning at her, showing teeth that had  gone too long without cleaning. He dropped a handful of coins, a few  bottle caps, a beer can pull tab, and several pieces of a shredded  photograph onto the counter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Lemon tea, Beej?” she said lightly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No. A mocha.” He gripped the edge of the counter, his hands visibly  shaking. “I found the shrine of the earthquake,” he said. “I followed the  path that leads to waste and hardpan. The god of the earthquake has  accepted my devotions.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Uh-huh,” Marzi said, turning to the espresso machine to start his drink.  “How have you been sleeping? You don’t look so good.” He didn’t smell  good, either; like mud, and ashes, and old carpets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I don’t need to sleep anymore,” he said. “My god gives me strength. But  Marzi . . .” He frowned, then shook his head.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What?” she asked, wondering why he’d been saying her name on the steps,  if she should be worried. He often flirted with her, awkwardly, and she  had a fondness for him despite his social deficiencies—he was always  polite, and a talented collage artist and photographer—but she questioned  if he was becoming obsessed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Nothing,” he said, not meeting her eyes, taking his drink and heading for  the Cloud Room. Beej liked that room the best. He said the castles in the  mist—certainly the most soothing of the several room-spanning murals in  the café—made him feel peaceful.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Marzi was about to drop his coins into the register when she noticed there  was an Indian head penny and a buffalo nickel in the mix, in addition to a  Sacagawea dollar coin. She pocketed those, making up the difference with  cash from her own pockets. She didn’t collect coins, but that mix of  change had a distinctly Old West feel. She’d never thought much before  about the way icons of the West appeared on currency. Maybe there was a  story in that—something about counterfeiting, or magically transforming  natural resources into cold cash. It seemed like more of an Aaron Burr  story than an Outlaw one, but that could be good—she hadn’t done much with  Burr in the past few issues of her comic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A scream, raw with shock and pain, erupted from the Cloud Room. Marzi came  around the counter fast, holding a knife she didn’t even remember picking  up, and ran toward the sound, her heart pounding. She raced through the  front room, bumping a little table with her hip and almost toppling it,  and reached the Cloud Room just in time to see some-  one dash into the Teatime Room. She only caught a glimpse of him, but he  was a striking figure: eagle feathers woven   into his black hair, flesh the color of pale sand, the skin on   his shirtless back oddly tattooed to resemble cracked earth. She didn’t go  after him—there was no other door out of   the Teatime Room anyway, and Beej was lying on the floor beside an  overturned chair, in need of more immediate at-  tention.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Marzi knelt by Beej, keeping one eye on the empty doorway to the Teatime  Room. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Did that guy hurt you?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Beej opened his eyes and looked up at her dreamily. Then he giggled. Marzi  flinched. If he’d wept, or whimpered, that would have been all right,  something she could deal with, but the giggle was strange and terrible.  “He wanted to see my brain,” Beej said. “To compare the wrinkles in my  head to a map of the canyons and gullies, to see if my mental terrain  matches the texture of his territories. To touch me more deeply, to write  his name with a knife in the folds of my   mind . . .” He trailed off, then sat up, rubbing his fingers across his  hairline, frowning. “Something . . .” He mumbled words she couldn’t  understand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    How could you tell if someone had just had a seizure? Maybe Beej was just  having a fit of some kind, and the tattooed guy didn’t have anything to do  with it. “Beej—” she began.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The room shook—more, the world shook, and Marzi fell against a table.  Earthquake, she thought, and almost as soon as she thought it, the quake  was over. It was a fairly strong quake, nothing like the Loma Prieta  disaster of 1989, but no tiny trembler, either. Marzi’s stomach kept  lurching even after the quake stopped, some part of her backbrain still  insisting the ground beneath her was unsafe. Beej tried to stand up, and  Marzi turned her attention to him, grateful to have something to set her  attention on after the chaos of the last few moments. “Hold on,” she said.  “There might be aftershocks.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No aftershocks,” he said, rising. “That was a foreshock. Just a hint of  things to come. I knew the earthquake was coming. The god gives me wisdom.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Marzi frowned and, after a moment, rose to her feet. Beej seemed  fine—physically, anyway—so she stepped toward the Teatime Room, still  holding her knife. She ducked her head inside, and there was no one there,  just empty tables watched over by the painted gods on the walls. The man  must have slipped out while she was distracted by the quake. “That man,  with the tattoos—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No tattoos,” Beej said. “His flesh is broken stone.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What—” she began, but then the day manager, Hendrix, called her from the  other room.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Marzi! Get in here! That quake knocked three bottles of syrup off the  shelf! It’s going to smell like Irish Cream in here for years!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You’re sure you’re okay?” she asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Never better,” Beej said, picking up his overturned chair. “I’m going  now. Things to do, people to be. See you later.” He waved cheerfully  before leaving.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He should get some help, Marzi thought, but that was as far as it went.  Beej wasn’t her responsibility, after all, but cleaning up the mess in the  other room was.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Later, when the quake clutter was cleared away and things had slowed to  the usual late-afternoon lull, Marzi sat staring for a while out the big  bay window onto Ash Street, watching bicycles and cars pass by. In Santa  Cruz there were only two seasons—rainy winter and sunny summer—and winter  was a long way off. The café was nearly deserted, and it looked a little  shabby with so few inhabitants: a thread-  bare couch, scrounged chairs, mismatched tables, worn and scratched wooden  floors. Only Garamond Ray’s enormous murals set Genius Loci apart from all  the other cafés in town, and up here in front the only painting was a  space-scape, all cold white stars and shadow-occulted planets, not the  loveliest of the murals. Still, the air smelled of coffee, there was a  good Two Dollar Pistols disc on the stereo, and the morning madness was  behind her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She spotted Denis, the most regular of the café’s regulars, looking dour  as always on the couch, leafing through a book about modern art. His muddy  boots were propped on the battle-scarred coffee table, making a mess, but  Marzi didn’t have the energy to tell him to put his feet down. An older  woman Marzi didn’t know sat drinking orange spice tea   in the Ocean Room, tapping her pen rhythmically against   the table, looking down at a spiral-bound notebook. A few tourists were  talking loudly out on the deck, the usual background noise to Marzi’s  workdays. Hendrix, pale and improbably dreadlocked, sat on a stool in the  kitchen, watching his tiny black-and-white television. He was the only  person who’d been working at Genius Loci longer than Marzi had, and the  only employee who’d been personally hired by the mysterious owners.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Marzi was on the verge of striking up a conversation   with Denis, in the vague hope that his condescension and af-  fected world-weariness would annoy her enough to keep her awake, when  Lindsay came through the door like a glittering whirlwind. “Marzipan!” she  said. “To what do we owe this honor? Shouldn’t you be sleeping, or hunched  over the drawing board?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Marzi grinned. “Tina called in sick, so Hendrix asked me to cover her  shift. I’ve got to work during the day tomorrow, too, but then I’ll be  back to my usual nocturnal ways.” Marzi was normally the night  manager—which was good, since that way she almost never had to see  Hendrix, who managed during the day.","brand":"Spectra","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304094028005,"sku":"NP9780553383386","price":12.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780553383386.jpg?v=1767741693","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-strange-adventures-of-rangergirl-isbn-9780553383386","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}