The Onion Girl
May 19th, 2007 by TooHotty
The Onion Girl / Charles de Lint
Tor, 2001 - 0765303817 (pbk.)
This is about The Onion Girl. It’s by Charles de Lint, and it’s the first book I’ve ever read of his. I read it for my Once Upon a Time reading challenge.
My emotional nerve ends seem to be a lot closer to the surface of my skin than they ever were. Too often everything and anything is a big deal. It can be from the way my coffee tastes in the morning to the way Goon might look at me; everything’s a major emotional experience.
It drives me crazy.
That quote sums up my opinion of this book.
Ok, that’s not entirely fair. Let’s start at the beginning.
The Onion Girl is a a novel from de Lint’s well-loved Newford series, Newford being a fictional American city where the magical and otherworldly creatures of fairy tales seem to have an easy time going from their world to ours. As a result, they interact with the lives of a group of friends who are either magical themselves or have been touched by it in some way. These stories are de Lint’s series, and The Onion Girl is one of them. From the middle.
It is the story of Jilly Coppercorn, an artist specializing in portraits of fairy creatures inhabiting the more unpleasant areas of the city. As the book opens, Jilly wakes up from a coma, a newly paralyzed victim of a hit-and-run. She is told that if she is ever to recover physically from the accident, she first has to recover from the trauma of her childhood (sexual abuse, running away, living on the streets, drugs, prostitution, you name it). Alongside this narrative is the story of Raylene, a hickish (the accent gets tiresome) young woman with a similarly sordid childhood who you discover hates Jilly.
The story itself is solid, if a weenie bit predictable. It’s a nice meditation on recovery and forgiveness. The author has a keen sense of relationships and how different people can respond to the same experiences depending on how they’ve grown up and who their friends are. This was the greatest appeal of The Onion Girl. Though the story switches perspectives with a dizzying frequency, the number of angles can actually help you reexamine some of the things in your own past with a fresh eye. That is, if you can keep up.
Picking up this series in the middle is supposed to be easy because the novels aren’t serial, but it turns out there are way too many characters to get to know really quickly. I couldn’t tell the difference between Sophie and Wendy for the entire novel. Also, it was difficult to determine the way de Lint’s faerie world (The Dreamlands, Manido-Aki, whatever, there are a number of names) works. There were no strict rules. “Oh, I get there by walking through walls.” “I get there by sort of astral projecting.” “I get there by dreaming I’m a wolf.” It’s as though he uses whatever convenient devices he needs to tell the story and let’s it slide with “Oh, yeah, it’s magic so that can happen.”
Ok, now we’re here. My major gripe. I know Jilly’s paralyzed. I know Raylene was molested. I know everyone’s life has seriously sucked on an epic scale. But man, sometimes I just wanted to knock these girls out. De Lint overdid it with the self-pitying. Part of it was because he has this tendency to shove meaning into your face when it would have been better left implied. Jilly especially says everything she feels and lays it out with no sublety at all as if you wouldn’t be able to understand. And she keeps calling herself “the Broken Girl” and says how she hates being the Broken Girl. Very annoying. Everything that happened in this book was part of some huge emotional catharsis, and even though that’s what the book’s about, catharsis, it got kind heavy-handed.
I complained more than I intended. This really isn’t a bad book. De Lint can write, his prose flows, his characters are unique (except for my Sophie/Wendy trouble). So I’m going to recommend that you check him out, but perhaps a different book. Widdershins is supposed to be pretty good.
Then again — and this is something you should keep in mind with this website — I have a bias against highly-emotional books and movies, and “heavy-handed” is a term I often use for them. Maybe I’m emotionally stunted, but the melodrama and saccharine “finding magic and goodness in everything” stuff irk me. I do see the appeal of this book for people who aren’t me. It might be right up your alley. How’s that for inconclusive?
More info:
Other reviews:
I read this ages ago. It was the first de Lint I ever read, and to be honest I wasn’t overly impressed. it was all right, but I could easily have left it. Since then I’ve read a few others by him, and enjoyed them a lot more. So maybe this is a bad example of his writing? I dunno. I quite liked The Blue Girl.
Actually, Blue Girl is the next one I was gonna try since it didn’t look like too much of a commitment. (I’m not one to give up on an author after one book.) So good! I’m optimistic.
Hope you enjoy it so.
This was the second I read by de Lint (the first being Yarrow) and I saw it as sort of a montage of the Newford characters. I like it, as I tend to like any new book about a new world in which the author presents tantalizing glimpses of stories still to be revealed, but I didn’t love it. (My review is here)
From what I’ve heard, people who have read the majority of the series think that this is one of the weaker books. I just couldn’t pass it up after staring at the cover for years in the bookstore.