“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Someplace to be Flying by Charles de Lint
Orb Books (2005)
384 pages

I’m not much of a fan of urban fantasy. I’m not familiar with Charles de Lint’s work. Someplace to be Flying is the first Charles de Lint novel I’ve read. It’s one of his Newford stories; while related to the other books, it can be read on its own. owlmoose did suggest (somewhere . . . I can’t find that thread anymore; certainly it wasn’t in my LJ) that perhaps the short story collection Dreams Underfoot is the best place to start.

I think my problems with this book starts at the start. As I said, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t read any of the Newford books, but there are so many characters and I felt like I needed charts to tell who is who. And for half of them, even up to the end, I couldn’t see what importance they were to the plot except being eccentric characters who know that something is going on. And to foreshadow stuff, I think.

It’s not to say that the characters aren’t interesting. The crow girls caught my attention at once, and I think I’m a bit in awe of Margaret.

It starts off relatively slow. Lily, a photojournalist in search of the animal people, meets Hank, a cab driver who’s familiar with the slums of Newford. The “animal people” part made me pause, but I went on reading anyway. The story’s format sort of threw me off as well — there are chapters, and then subchapters in the chapters (mostly for point-of-view changes) which came a bit too often for my liking. The other problem was the chunks of text in italics — stories being told, or perhaps flashbacks — that were a bit hard to read, and I found myself skimming through those very fast, and possibly missed some stuff.

Once I got past the first few chapters, I flew through the rest of the book. The premise is interesting, and the mythology woven into the story was a definite plus. The ending left me scratching my head though. Light? Going in, coming out? Huh? I understand what was going on, but I had this disconnected feeling from the whole ending. (I guess I can get lumped with Rory and the other sceptics.)

Other things: Hank/Lily just didn’t work for me. It just keeps fizzling. Jack and Nettie held my interest much longer; pretty much till the end.

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Oh. WordPress 2.5 is out. Upgrades, here we go — though not now. Tomorrow morning, maybe.