Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Barb Johnson's fiction debut is a series of linked stories set in early 21stC New Orleans. More of This World or Maybe Another tells the neighborhood stories from a canal town and how these school kids reconnect as neighbors in Mid-City New Orleans. (It's available in paper and as an ebook from Kobo, an ePUB only bookstore.) 

Johnson is funny, wise, and thrilling. Her people face terrifying realities with various amounts of skill and bad luck. They inhabit their bodies and make their dreams manifest. Here's a high school adventure turning romantic:

 begin quote It's windy and quiet, except for the sound of the refineries, a clanking, hissing sound, a sound like a big brain working. In the sky, a yellow cloud of sulfur is backlit and hangs in the air like a ghost above the bridge, whose massive underside is straight out of a nightmare. Delia cannot begin to guess what it is that's keeping that bridge from collapsing under its own weight.

They climb up three stories to the top of one of the tanks, and Charlene pulls her hair over one shoulder to braid it. "Hold this a minute," she says, and hands Delia the braid while she secures the end with a twist tie, the kind that comes on a bread wrapper. Something about the feel of the silky plait embarrasses Delia, and she has to look away.

She and Charlene stand on a small platform, their shoulders nearly touching. The world below, the road they were just on, seems small and strange. The world of the tank is the real world now. Delia's queasy with excitement.

Red lights flash on the top of each storage tank to keep the crop-dusters from running into them. Long strings of red stretch out into the night, marking some higher road. Delia imagines stepping out onto that red highway, following it to see where it goes.

Across the river a scatter of lights. Their high school's over there, and beyond that, Delia's house, which, if she could see it, would be in a dark field, surrounded by other dark fields, lit only by the pale fruit of egrets sleeping in the trees along the bayou. Everything is so small and far away. If she went into her house right now, she imagines it would be like when she tried to put a regular-sized doll in the dollhouse her father made for her. If she went in her house right now, she couldn't tuck her own long legs under the dinner table without flipping the thing over, the tiny plates spilling the food that will never be enough again. She imagines the clothes in her closet and sees doll clothes, her bed, a shoe box that would collapse beneath her.

In the other direction, night is rolled out as far as Delia can see. There's a swamp out there, she knows, and the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond that, there could be anything. More of this world or maybe another.

Delia searches the sharp, bright curves of Charlene's face for some clue about what comes next. Everything that isn't Charlene disappears. Like a small bird flying into the wind, Delia's hand migrates toward her. It skitters to a stop on the slope of Charlene's waist, shaky from the trip. quote ends 

This interview with Barb Johnson has useful info on how she writes, and even more helpful detail on how she realized in her mid-40s she could become a writer and go to college.