41. Widdershins by Charles de Lint (Urban Fantasy) 560 p.

I’d heard enough good things about Charles de Lint that when I got the chance to buy Widdershins, with its very attractive cover, at half off the remaindered price, I jumped at the chance. I didn’t know much about this book before I read it today, except that it was urban fantasy and part of a loosely-connected series of novels set in the imaginary North American city of Newford. I didn’t know how much I was going to love this book.

Actually, even after I started it, I wasn’t sure I was going to like it at all. The beginning, where a young Celtic fiddler named Lizzie is stranded by car trouble and has her first encounter with the magical world, caught my interest in a limited way. I liked Lizzie, and I wouldn’t have minded seeing a good bit more of her, but the point of view shifted in the next chapter, to a character I wasn’t nearly so interested in (although luckily Lizzie returned throughout the book.)

I’m not a fan of perspective shifts; they only work for me when I’m equally interested in all of the characters, and when the author resolves suspenseful episodes before skipping to another point of view. Charles de Lint doesn’t do that, unfortunately, and it continued to be something of a problem for me throughout the book—although less so as I got to know and be interested in more of his characters.

As Charles de Lint mentions in his author’s note, Widdershins was written partly because of requests from his fans that he write more about a particular character, Jilly, and show her getting together with her friend Geordie, since everyone but the two of them can see that they’re made for each other. I’m very grateful that de Lint didn’t limit the scope of his book to Jilly and Georgie, because I found them by far the least interesting characters in the book—especially when they were together! Maybe it’s because this book was written with established fans in mind, but there was a lot more telling than showing when it came to their personalities; I still don’t feel like I know much about the two of them beyond the things said by other characters in the book.

So I was reading along, mildly interested, but not enough to carry me through a 560-page book. The urban fantasy element wasn’t much different from other things I’d read, the plot wasn’t really going anywhere yet, and the characters weren’t wonderful enough to carry the story on their own. Then I got to page 111, and I started to sit up and take notice.

He was a curious little man, born a treekin—a kind of fairy about the height of a man’s knee, made of twigs and mulch and leaves and moss, all held together in the shape of a human body with a weaving of braided grasses and vines. Treekin needed to replenish their body parts from time to time—when a twig got old and chipped, or when a grass braid snapped and the press of leaves and moss that gave shape to limbs began to fall away. The materials they needed for repair were easy to find, even in a city, for there were always gardens and parks to plunder amongst the tall towers of concrete and steel.

But in the past few decades, many of the treekin began to utilize bits and pieces of electronics and computer parts for their repairs, metamorphosing over time into creatures made as much of wiring and circuitry as they were of organic material. Eventually, some, like Edgan, became creatures entirely made of synthetic castoffs; each techno treekin—as they came to be called—as individual as the materials they were able to scrounge. In Edgan’s case, he had a torso built up around a computer motherboard; his limbs and head were a complicated tangle of wiring and less identifiable objects, though his nose was certainly a spark plug and his eyes a pair of camera lenses.

He was in Computer World tonight because he’d recently seen another of the techno treekin sporting an iPod in the twisting snarl of wires that held her torso together, and he simply had to have one himself. He already had a PDA wired into his motherboard body—as well as a digital camera and a pair of cell phones—but its memory capacity couldn’t match the sixty gigabytes of the iPod. The iPod would be perfect for storing the data he pilfered from the Internet, but he also liked the shiny whiteness of its case for how it matched his spark plug nose.

I don’t know why, but that passage really appealed to me, and from that point on, I was fully engaged in the story Charles de Lint’s characters were telling me. In the end, it’s an intriguing one, about a potential war between the fairies, who came over from Europe with the first North American immigrants, and the Cousins, or First People, who were there before them. It’s also a story about hurt, malice, abuse, and vengeance, and how those things can keep hurting even after the fact. Ultimately, it’s about love and understanding, and about finding common ground. The message was a little heavy-handed, but the plot had a strong enough hold on me that I didn’t much mind.

There were a few other things I was going to mention that could have been better, but on the whole I loved the book so much I don’t want to add too many complaints to my review. Even characters I wasn’t very fond of at first tended to grow on me, and the majority are people I’d like to read more about. That’s why I’m going to end this on a positive note, with another quote (a short one this time!) Here’s an exchange between the crow girls that for no good reason had me in stiches:

“Don’t be rude,” she tells Zia.
“They’re not bribes?”
“Why would out veryvery good friends Geordie and Jilly ever need to bribe us?”
Zia shrugs. “So that we’ll behave?”
“Don’t mind her,” Maida says to me. “She was brought up in a tree by an old magpie.”

Pages read: 11,424

Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, A ~ Z Reading Challenge, Cardathon Challenge, Charles de Lint, Chunkster Challenge 2008, Newford, Once Upon a Time II