It’s always a gift to pick up a book you’ve never heard of—one that’s not on the bestseller list or written by one of the big-name authors—and discover its beauty. That’s what I experienced with Hummingbird. This is a beautiful summer read. It will transport you to the bush and beyond.
You can read my full review on the Ottawa Review of Books.
Grace is blessed with multiple meanings in Charles de Lint’s 2009 urban fantasy novel, The Mystery of Grace. She is an idea and also a woman. This strong beautiful tattooed deva is at once kind, charming, thoughtful, and at ease around a classic car. (She grew up rebuilding hotrods with her Abuelo and works wonders at Sanchez Motors). She loves rockabilly and surf guitar. She is virtuous in her own way and both gives and receives divine assistance. She is also dead and therefore, seeking grace early in the story.
In this 2010 interview with Charles de Lint, the author says that the book is about appreciating the moment, not waiting and missing opportunities. For life is short. You never know when you will vanish from this world and reappear in another unknown place. I agree with the author, but I also found this book to be about Faith (with a capital F). And Fear. The fear of what happens after we die permeates this book and it is only through Faith that the characters can stop waiting and walk through the mist into the unknown. Grace Quintero wears her life tattooed on her body. On her shoulder is Grace’s namesake, Our Lady of Altagracia. It is her faith in love and los santos that sees her through the limbo state (about two years in human time). But how does she end up there?
This story is set in the American Southwest. Ironically, Grace goes to buy cigarettes at Luna’s and gets shot twice in the chest by a junkie. “It’s not the cough that carries you off, it’s the coffin they carry you off in,” my mother, Grace, used to quip. Grace Quintero dies and wakes up in a parallel world. Her apartment at the Alverson Arms, in the small desert town of Santo del Vado Viejo still exists, but she is imprisoned with several other lost souls within a two-three block radius. Some have been there for decades as this limbo world seems to have been created in August 1965, and everyone who dies in proximity to the Alverson Arms lands here.
After making friends with the locals, Grace learns the rules. They don’t need to eat or sleep, but they can. Some end up comatose (sleepers). Henry, who lives at the Solina Library says: “if you don’t keep yourself busy, it all goes away. First your memories, then the desire to do anything, finally whatever it is that makes you who you are” (65). Going into the misty boundaries at the edges of the Alverson world also affects memories, and going back to the real world can be traumatic. Yes. Grace can go back to her home, but only twice a year, on Samhain and Beltane. And no one will recognize her.
On her first visit home, Grace meets artist John Burns and it’s love at first sight. They spend the night together but at dawn, she disappears, leaving John lonely and confused. Their relationship is only a flutter of what this book is about, so I won’t call it paranormal romance (though John is human and Grace a ghost.) This book, like all de Lint’s books, runs deep, crosses genres, and defies labels.
Norm, a distant cousin of shaman Ramon Morago, is the only one who can see Grace when she returns twice a year and he keeps telling her to “find her path.” Norm is Kikimi, and a kind of funky spiritual advisor to the lost girl caught in limbo. Morago and the Kikimi people are the subject of de Lint’s latest novel, The Wind in his Heart—my review here). Norm sees dead people and must use prayers and sacred smudge (sage) to keep the spirits at bay. Once they know you can see them, they keep harassing you. They’re lonely and want to talk. A shaman can choose but Norm doesn’t have a filter. He must pretend not to see them; otherwise, they drive him to drink.
What happens when we die? Will we be reunited with our ancestors? With those we love? Do heaven and hell exist? Or do we go into a kind of limbo to await our next incarnation? The Mystery of Grace inspires us to question our belief in God and the afterlife.
As always, de Lint, weaves a sensual tapestry of landscape, music, love, and culture. I am dazzled by his creativity, his brilliance, and his daring. Into this story, de Lint pours the tale of Juan—Juan can capture a bruja (witch) and turn her magic back on her “because the priest Juan Diego was the first to see Our Lady of Guadalupe” (197). Why does Grace needs to know about Juan? That is a question best left unanswered.
I leave you with a quote by Alice Hoffman.
Charles de Lint is the modern master of urban fantasy. Folktale, myth, fairy tale, dreams, urban legend—all of it adds up to pure magic in de Lint’s vivid, original world.
The meaning behind the title of Kelley Armstrong’s latest Rockton crime novel, This Fallen Prey, still alludes me. Does This Fallen Prey refer to the victims of the serial killer who is dropped off bound and gagged without warning? There are several victims in this fast-paced thriller. Or is the thrill killer, himself, This Fallen Prey? Oliver Brady claims to be the victim of a rich and powerful step-father bent on cheating him out of his inheritance. Gregory Wallace has $15 million reasons to frame his step-son as a serial killer, and has paid a million dollars to send him to Rockton for a six-month stint. The problem for our heroes, Sheriff Eric Dalton and Detective Casey Butler, is what to do with Brady while he’s there under their watch. Once the townsfolk discover they’re housing a psychotic serial killer no one will be safe, including Brady.
This is Armstrong’s third Casey Butler detective novel. It is as fast and flawless as City of the Lost, the book that introduces us to this dysfunctional Yukon town. Rockton is a fabricated town, built in the wilderness to house people who need to go missing. Many are victims in need of protection; others, like Casey, have been both victimized and killed. In the second book, A Darkness Absolute, Casey seals the deal with rugged backwoods sheriff, Eric Dalton, and becomes mama to a bouncing Newfoundland puppy named Storm.
In fact, the dog, who is now eight-months-old and learning to track, is a major character in the novel, as is the setting. Much of the story centres around the search for Oliver Brady, who escapes early on with the help of one of Rockton’s citizens. Casey and Dalton must battle hostiles and wild animals, while avoiding snipers; all the while, trying to keep the puppy safe. Anyone who owns a dog will understand what it’s like to hike with a dog in the woods. Dangers lurk everywhere. And, Kelley Armstrong has done her canine research.
In my favourite scene, Storm lurches free of Casey’s grip and bounds after a mountain lion with the detective in pursuit. Casey chases, knowing that the cat is heading for a cliff where it can turn around, leap onto her dog’s back, and break her neck. Casey shouts out a series of commands—too many words and pointless—as Storm is too far away to hear and focussed on nothing but chasing this kitty. This creates sheer terror for Casey, who must somehow save her puppy, and any reader who has ever lost control of her dog. Like Casey, Storm is not just there for show. Armstrong not only uses the dog to heighten the adventure, but as a clever device to advance the plot.
This is Casey’s story. Though she’s searching along with her partner, Eric Dalton, everyone defers to her, including the sheriff. A tiny Mandarin-speaking murderer turned detective, Casey is fearless, intelligent, intuitive, and scarred. Sometimes, she makes mistakes, and sometimes she knows the truth with just a look. Preferring to sleep out on the balcony under the stars, Casey provides us with an opportunity to experience this secret dystopian Yukon town and its surrounding wildness.
As the search continues, Dalton and Casey discover corpses. By chapter forty, I write in my journal: Brady appears to be a ruthless murderer but there must be a twist. If there isn’t, I will be disappointed. Then Brady’s step-dad arrives and I’m not disappointed. By chapter sixty, I’m still wondering, along with Casey, if Brady is a serial killer, or if he really is being framed by his step-dad. He almost has me convinced. Is he, or isn’t he? How will Casey discover the truth? And who will die in the process?
Rarely do I read a novel in less than 24 hours, but at 289 pages, Dragon Teeth is a quick, exciting, and informative read. It hooked me with its setting, its adventurous plot, and its historical fervour. Oh, and what a cover.
Dragon Teeth is the posthumously-published adventure novel of Michael Crichton who passed away on November 4, 2008 after battling cancer. He was only sixty-six years old. After reading about Crichton, I think the man was something of a genius.
Crichton always wanted to be a writer, but not a shadow-writer: a full-time make-a-living-from-writing writer. Fearing that wouldn’t happen, he opted to study at Harvard and graduated as a doctor in 1969. That didn’t stop him from writing though. In fact, he financed his studies at Harvard Medical School with his novels, and his first bestseller The Andromeda Strain was released as a film before he finished. Though he never practiced as a doctor, Crichton’s scientific and medical studies provided inspiration and experitise for many of his novels. He went on to become a director and filmmaker.
This is perhaps a forerunner to his famous Jurassic Park–dinosaurs and palaeontologists form the backbone. That a new Crichton novel can appear now, nine years after his death, is a kind of miracle. Like many writers, Crichton kept files, and this particular manuscript appeared complete. In an Entertainment Weekly article, Crichton’s widow, Sherri says:
“When I came across the Dragon Teeth manuscript in the files, I was immediately captivated. It has Michael’s voice, his love of history, research and science all dynamically woven into an epic tale. Dragon Teeth was clearly a very important book for Michael. I’m so pleased to continue the long relationship that he shared with HarperCollins with its publication.” Finding Dragon Teeth
The protagonist, William Johnson, is a rich, arrogant, and privileged young Yale student who loses a bet, and must, to save face, journey into the lawless West. It is the summer of 1876. Sitting Bull and his Sioux warriors are retaliating against the white man for the loss of their Sacred Black Hills and warring with the Crow. General Custer has just made his last stand at the Little Bighorn. The buffalo have not yet been wiped out, but soon will be, in an effort to starve the Indians into submission or extinction. And out in the Montana Badlands, two rival paleotonogists, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edmund Drinker Cope, are warring over dinosaur bones. All of this is historically researched.
“In 1876, scientific acceptance of dinosaurs was still fairly recent; at the turn of the century, men did not suspect the existence of these great reptiles at all, although the evidence was there to see” (107).
While scientists and creationists vehemently debate Darwin’s new theory of evolution, these two real-life paleontologists engage in “Bone Wars.” Along with Johnson, we journey from Philadelphia all the way to Deadwood. By train, stagecoach, and on horseback. Through city, mountain, desert, and on into the Badlands.
Johnson, who learns photography–because he has no other appreciable skills–hires on with the abrasive Marsh; then ends up with Cope, a natural teacher who instructs and entertains his crew with his knowledge of dinosaurs.
“Well, it seems you can see everything but the bones. Now: look in the middle of the cliff, for a cliff this high will have its Cretacious zone near the middle–a lower cliff, it might be nearer the top–but this one, it will be in the middle–just below that pink striation band there. Now run your eye along the band until you see a kind of roughness, see there? That oval patch there? Those are bones.”
In the Judith Badlands (Montana Territory), Cope discovers the fossilized teeth of a dinosaur larger than anything yet discovered and names it “Brontosaurus, ‘thunder lizard,’ because it must have thundered when it walked” (144). Hence the title.
Edmund Drinker Cope (from The New Yorker)
General Armstrong Custer
One of the things I appreciate about this book is the historical narrator who interjects with relevant background. He seems objective; at least, more objective than a man in 1876 might be. He points out the racist and inhumane practices of the controversial Custer, and explains the background behind the Sioux War.
The federal government had signed a treaty with the Sioux in 1868, and as part of that treaty, the Dakota Sioux retained exclusive rights to the Black Hills, a landscape sacred to them…Yet one year after the treaty had been signed, the transcontinental railroads began service, providing access in days to land that could previously be reached only by weeks of difficult overland travel.
Even so, the Sioux lands might have been respected had not Custer discovered gold during a routine survey in the Black Hills in 1874. News of gold fields, coming in the midst of a nationwide recession, was irresisible.
Although forbidden by the government, prospectors sneaked into the sacred Black Hills. The army mountained expeditions in ’74 and ’75 to chase them out, and the Sioux killed them whenever they found them. But still the prospectors came in ever increasing numbers.
Believing the treaty had been broken, the Sioux went on the warpath. In May of 1876, the government ordered the army to quell the Sioux uprising (45).
Sitting Bull
It is into this arena that Johnson journeys with his rival paleontologists. The author uses Johnson’s fictional diaries to tell the tale of two real-life bone hunters. A ten-year rivalry collapses into one raucous summer. It is this melding of truth (if such a thing exists in the historical record) and tale that ensnares me and draws me into the man’s journey.
If you have a liking for westerns, for history, for adventurous tales, this book will capture you too.
Farrell Cockburn, Blackfoot Artist
The Wind in his Heart is set on a fictional reservation in the American Southwest. A desert people, who dwell in the Painted Lands, the Kikimi have a long complex history. Before the Spaniards and the Americans invaded from the south and the east, the people grew corn, beans, and squash and lived peaceably along the San Pedro River. Forced into the mountains, they became warriors and fought back, until the Women’s Council “saw the futility of battling the endless tide of invaders” and they forged an uneasy and unequal peace. As is the case on some reserves today, a conflict arose between traditionalists intent on preserving culture and those open to cultivating business, like casinos, on the reservation.
In The Wind in his Heart, the protagonists are traditionalists. A conflict arises when Sammy Swift Grass, who manages the casino, guides hunters into the mountains to kill a bighorn sheep. The problem is: the sheep is actually Derek Two Trees, a ma’inawo who happened to be shot while in his animal form. Sammy has his head, ready to give to the hunters for mounting.
Two worlds converge: the contemporary Kikimi world and the mythic otherworld—ghost lands where the spirits and ma’inawo dwell. The otherworld is like Faerie, and as in Faerie, humans who venture there are changed. Aging halts. In the otherworld, past, present, and future occur simultaneously.
Time moves differently on the other side. The otherworld is actually an onion of worlds, each skin peeling back a different layer to reveal yet another world. In some places, years pass in what are only minutes here. In others, a few days can be a decade.
The ma’inawo are magical beings who can appear in either human or animal form or as both together. Naturally, the traditionalists, many of whom are ma’inawo themselves, want to avenge the murder of Derek and other ma’inawo.
“Derek Two Trees wasn’t the first to die at the hands of Sammy Swift Grass and his hunters…The kin of other victims have been speaking to the wind, asking for justice,” says Abigail White Feather (Aggie). Like other characters in this story, Aggie moves between worlds. She appears to be in her eighties, but was born before the Europeans invaded the Painted Lands. Aggie is an elder, a wise woman, and an artist. She paints the ma’inawo as she sees them. “Weird animal-human hybrids” like Calico, the foxalope. Sometimes, Calico sprouts horns; other times, she wears the face of fox, and still other times; she is a beautiful red-haired woman. Similarly, Aggie’s red dog, Ruby, shifts between being a dog and a woman.
John Nieto
Susan Seddon Boulet, Chaco Canyon
Farrell Cockburn, Blackfoot Artist
Adee Dodge Gouache, Navajo Artist
Charles de Lint continues to be one of my favourite writers. You might not have heard of him; after all, he is a Canadian writer who makes his home in Ottawa. Sometimes, I can’t even find his books in Canadian libraries, which is a shame, because he is a gifted storyteller–an original, who has written more than 70 novels for children, young adults, and adults, and received several awards for his work.
Renowned as one of the trailblazers of the modern fantasy genre, he is the recipient of the World Fantasy, Aurora, Sunburst, and White Pine awards, among others. Modern Library’s Top 100 Books of the 20th Century poll, conducted by Random House and voted on by readers, put eight of de Lint’s books among the top 100.
If you like Neil Gaiman, I guarantee you will like Charles de Lint. His Newford series is fantastic. Widdershins (book #11 in the Newford Series) is one of my all-time favourite books. I just bought Dreams Underfoot and am blown away by what I’ve read so far.
Like me, Charles loves myth and folklore, so it finds its way into his urban fantasy novels. He is also a poet, an artist, and a musician, like many of his characters.
I’ve taken to calling my writing “mythic fiction,” because it’s basically mainstream writing that incorporates elements of myth and folktale, rather than secondary world fantasy.
I emailed Charles de Lint and asked for a digital copy of his latest novel, The Wind in his Heart, so I could review it for the Ottawa Review of Books. He kindly obliged, but then, before I could read and review it, someone else beat me to it. It’s one of their December selections and you can read it here.
So, this is not a traditional review. It’s more of a ramble about how reading the novel affected me. I read The Wind in his Heart quickly the first time through because I really wanted to know what happened to these various eccentric characters. De Lint weaves the story through multiple viewpoints and each character has their own tale to tell, but the main thread winds around the arrival of a young girl named Sadie Higgins.
When Sadie is dumped on the Kikimi Rez by her abusive father, she is rescued by an ageless musician named Steve Cole who takes her to stay with Abigail White Horse (Aggie), an eighty-year old Kikimi artist. After mending Sadie’s physical wounds with desert herbs, one of the first things Aggie does is feed her. Sadie’s never eaten much that didn’t come from a can or arrive as take out, so Aggie’s traditional stew makes an impression.
But she didn’t say anything like that to Aggie as they chopped squash, celery, carrots and peppers for a vegetable and bean stew. But she had to speak up when Aggie kept telling her all these stories about bean boys and squash girls, and the feud between the spirits of the chilies and the jalapenos…The stew, served with flatbread on the side was actually pretty good, and Sadie told Aggie so. It was spicy and full of flavours she didn’t recognize. She had two bowls full, and didn’t even miss having meat.
Aggie’s stew got me thinking about the butternut squash girl sitting on my counter. She ended up in a pot with jalapenos, garlic, and onions. I found this basic Three Sister’s Stew recipe online and adapted it. I blended the baked squash, tomatoes, and spices, and then added white beans and corn. It came out looking like this.
Last night, I ended up making black bean burritos inspired by the book. And today I’m working on a chili. How do foods in novels inspire you?
The Kikimi people are a fictional Native American tribe from the American Southwest. I travelled through New Mexico a decade ago in March, and fell in love with the red rocks, the cactus, and the surreal landscape. De Lint’s descriptive passages transport me there. Leah Hardin, a writer from Newford, is the most affected by the beauty she encounters all around her.
Once they got out of town, Leah drank in the austere landscape, appreciating every subtlety of faded colour. She loved how the shape of the land wasn’t hidden by swaths of trees the way it was in the hills back home. Instead, she could see every nuance as the spartan panorama spread away from the highway, rolling into the distance like the dry waves of a dusty sea.
They say that artists love New Mexico because the light is different than anywhere else. The colours are dazzling and it’s easy to see why turquoise and adobe reds find their way into Four Corners architecture. We visited Georgia O’Keefe’s studio north of Santa Fe. It’s like walking on the set of an old Western. As winter engulfs the northern hemisphere, this is an area to explore. Take along The Wind in his Hair and immerse yourself in the desert culture.
Coming next: Kikimi Cousins, Shamans & Otherworldly Phenomenon