Books : Widdershins (Newford)

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Author name: Charles de Lint

: Widdershins (Newford)
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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Tor Books
Manufacturer: Tor Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 560
Printing Date: May 16, 2006
Publishing house: Tor Books
Release Date: May 16, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 128731
Studio: Tor Books



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Editor's Notes and Comments:

Product Description:
Jilly Coppercorn and Geordie Riddell. Since they were introduced in the very first Newford story, 'Timeskip,' back in 1989, their friends and readers alike have been waiting for them to realize what everybody else already knows: that they belong together. But they've been more clueless about how they feel for each other than the characters in When Harry Met Sally. Now in Widdershins, a stand-alone novel of fairy courts set in shopping malls and the Bohemian street scene of Newford's Crowsea area, Jilly and Geordie’s story is finally being told.

Before it’s over, we’ll find ourselves plunged into the rancorous and sometimes violent conflict between the magical North American “animal people” and the more newly-arrived fairy folk. We’ll watch as Jilly is held captive in a sinister world based on her own worst memories—and Geordie, attempting to help, is sent someplace even worse. And we’ll be captivated by the power of love and determination to redeem ancient hatreds and heal old magics gone sour.

To walk “widdershins” is to walk counterclockwise or backwards around something. It’s a classic pathway into the fairy realm. It’s also the way people often back slowly into the relationships that matter, the real ones that make for a life. In Widdershins Charles de Lint has delivered one of his most accessible and moving works of his career.




Customer Reviews
User popularity level: out of 5 stars

Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - Glad to see them get together... finally..
I'm glad this book was written. but i couldnt give it 5 stars.. When the newford series began, it was all about brushing up against the edges of magic.. drawing you into the mystery of "what if.." Lately its like the mystery isnt there anymore.. That feeling I got from the very first books in the newford series is not there anymore... alot of the joy i get from this series was lacking..


Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - A fine story within an unfocused framework
"Widdershins" deals very satisfyingly with unresolved matters from "The Onion Girl" (my favorite De Lint book to this date), and it is a must-read for those interested in knowing how Jilly faces her paralysis and her relationship with Geordie. The sections involving these topics are fresh and exciting, and they lead to emotional high points of great intensity. But between these sections lies some less-than-exhilarating material.

As readers of "The Onion Girl" know, Jilly as a child was repeatedly raped by her brother then became a junkie and prostitute living on the streets. After a kind cop rescued her, she grew up to be a warm, flighty artist with a huge heart. But she eventually was hit by a car and lost the ability to paint. Her magical friends may one day be able to repair her body, but only after she confronts the emotional wounds from her past.

Through a chain of events too complicated to explain, she ends up trapped in her "heart home," a piece of the otherworld comprised of people and places she unknowingly created out of her own memories. According to the book, a heart home is normally a happy and peaceful place, but as we see here, it can be an incredibly dangerous place, where one's deepest fears and hangups become a reality. For Jilly, the experience quickly turns into a life-threatening nightmare.

The manner in which she and some other characters handle this situation is fascinating, and I enjoyed every moment of it. But this is only one of several plot threads. The book centers on a potential war between fairies and "cousins." Fairies, we are told, came to the Americas along with the European explorers. Cousins are the original inhabitants, consisting of people who can take the form of specific animals, depending on their bloodline. (The book's cover art has nothing to do with the story, and that's too bad, because a picture of the man with the deer head would have been cool.)

The plot is set into motion by a cousin from the salmon clan who enlists a gang of bogans (a type of fairy) to hunt down the man who blinded him. They cause so much destruction in their path that they threaten the cold peace currently existing between fairies and cousins. This premise is spurred along by so many mishaps and misjudgments on the part of various characters that it begins to border on comedy, but never quite crosses that border.

While it's an old convention to have the conflict between fictional races serve as a metaphor for racial tensions in our world, De Lint maps out the situation in an intriguingly complex way. Very few of his characters are fundamentally bad. Each group has its own rules and perspective, coming from cultures dominated by powerful sorcery and immense lifespans. ("Human lives are so fleeting compared to ours," remarks one of the fairies condescendingly.) "Widdershins" follows the pattern of De Lint's later books in presenting no clear division between good and evil, and in exploring nonviolent solutions--not quite Gandhi territory, but close.

Jilly is clearly the most compelling character, and the emotional crescendo that her story achieves is unparalleled by anything else in the book. I also like Joe Crazy Dog, the half-crow, half-canine cousin who is the series' closest thing to a traditional hero. But I had trouble warming up to Grey, the cousin being hunted. The book hints at romantic possibilities between him and Lizzie, a spunky fiddler he rescues from the bogans, but he is too wounded from his own experiences to open up to her or anyone else. As for Mother Crone, her character is never developed enough for us to understand the attraction between her and Geordie. She seems to exist in the plot mostly to create a wedge between him and Jilly.

The story of the fairy-cousin skirmishes, in contrast, features a lot of politics and little payoff. Perhaps De Lint is setting up for later developments in future books, though in the introduction he notes that he rarely writes direct sequels. Whatever his plans, the material weighs down an otherwise captivating adventure.

P.S. I unfortunately read "Widdershins" before "The Onion Girl." Do not make the same mistake--not only because it will ruin the surprises of the earlier book, but even more because it will make the later book harder to follow.


Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - Fairy land
"Widdershins" by Charles de Lins, © 2006

Many thanks to Borders for allowing me to read another book. I buy coffee to go with it, my wife buys coffee and reads magazines and cook books. We generally end up spending some money there, so it is not just a library experience.
Really good story about fairies and brogans and doonies, and than there are the Earth spirits like Raven and Walker (deer) and Grey (crow) and Cody (half breed, crow and coyote). It seems the story takes place in Alabama or Mississippi, some small town, Nowheresville, but full of magic.
Liz has blown into town with her band to play a weekend at a bar/hotel there (it seems strange that it is there and I do not know how this place supports a bar/hotel, but really it happens all the time in small towns all over the land). She wants to avoid problems with other members of the band, so she goes off by herself to do something, and her car breaks down. Here she is stranded in the middle of nowhere and no idea of what to do. Along come four or five guys carrying a dead deer, there is a bit of confrontation, she gets help from this stranger Grey, he starts her car, tells her to go back and get it fixed at a place and when he leaves, he just walks down the road and disappears. Then the fun starts: the gang with the dead deer are brogans, who hunt and generally create mayhem, Grey is a spirit being from way back and is related to Indian beliefs. Lizzie is not alone in this weird world of fairies and spirits. Jilly and Geordie and Chris are all in on the problems and excitement from before and help Liz do the right thing, as well as introduce her and the band to the other world of fairies and such.
The structure of the story, chapters are arranged by character, is fun and gets the story going very nicely. You slowly get to know the different people and their history. I enjoyed reading it the whole time.


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - Full of wonder, surprises, and the hard-to-believe
Story: This summary will end up sounding very strange, but Charles de Lint is known for writing unusual stories, that are commonly categorized as urban fantasy, and Widdershins is certainly both strange and fantastic.

Set in and around the fictional town of Newford, somewhere in Canada, there is trouble brewing. It all started centuries ago, when the Europeans arrived in the Americas. Along with them, and unbeknownst to them, they brought with them a host of beings born of, or the basis of, their folklore. They include trolls, gnomes, bogans, and the more stereotypical fairies, but they are all part of the group of entities referred to by the term fairy. As the European humans clashed with, and generally conquered the natives of the Americas, so did the European fairy-folk clash with the spirits of the native Americans. Eventually, an uneasy truce was reached between the fairy kingdom, and the spirits, with the fairies sticking to the urban areas, alongside the humans who brought them, and the native spirits keeping to the purple and wild places of the continent.

This particular story starts when a human, Lizzie, gets stuck out in a rural area, with her car not working, and is accosted by a band of bogans, which are troll-like members of the fairy kingdom. Bogans are not supposed to be out in the rural places, but these bogans have formed a strange and uneasy alliance with a rogue native spirit, Odawa, who has an agenda of his own. Just as the bogans are about to get pretty vicious with Lizzie, two other native spirits, Grey and Walker, separately step in, to intervene.

Following this rescue, the story unfolds into a complex tale involving humans, fairy, and native spirits. Amongst the humans, there are several very likeable characters, namely Geordie Riddell and Jilly Coppercorn, who will be familiar to readers of other stories by Charles de Lint. Lizzie is a relative newcomer to de Lint fans, but fits right in. Amongst the fairy characters, there are also very interesting ones, like Mother Crone and Rabedy Collins.

Readers of de Lint will know, though, that the author often includes strong elements of Native American folklore, and the native spirit characters in this story are the most fascinating, or, they were to me, at they are the most numerous. Maida and Zia, the crow girls, are back to play a medium-sized roles. Raven is back, and is more involved than in many of the previous stories. Walker of the cerva (deer) clan was new to me, but was complex and very interesting. Joe, who has both canid (dog) and corbae (crow) heritage, has a big role, and teams up, unexpectedly with the sometimes unpredictable Jack of the coyote clan. Odawa, who initially seems to be a typical villain, turns out to be highly complicated and somewhat sympathetic, and is of the salmon clan. There is a big meeting near the end, where we also meet members of the otter clan and the dolphin clan. And, one character, Christiana Tree is not human, fairy, native spirit, or any combination of those; she is a shadow, come to life, and compromised of the all those aspects of the self that another character cast off, in childhood. Christiana survived, and grew into an adult, and is a character most readers will not forget.

The characters are not only diverse in background, but are complex and well-developed. Even the characters who are not human, are quite credible. The author also likes to give his characters some flair and attitude, and he is not afraid to give them flaws. None of them is boring! I did struggle with one chapter, where, Joe, Jack, and Grey were together. During their conversations, I had trouble keeping track of which one was talking. Charles de Lint uses a technique, in this book, that I am seeing more often: each chapter is told from a different viewpoint, with a rotation between this "ensemble cast" of motley characters. He does this well enough to not hurt the flow of the overall story.

Charles de Lint's books carry the underlying premise that there is much more to the world than that which science can account for, and that belief can open up entire new worlds and realities that otherwise lie just outside of our line of vision. Widdershins takes that approach and that idea as far as any of de Lint's books have. One story-line takes place entirely inside the mind of one of the characters, with other characters getting pulled in and trapped. Another story-line takes place in neither what we think of as the "real" world, which the character Raven pulled out of an old pot in the long ago, nor in the other worlds of the fairy and the native spirits, but in the in-between.

If all of this sounds strange and confusing and weird, it is strange and weird. Despite the complexity of the tale, its length (560 pages), the big cast of highly unusual characters, and the otherworldliness of the story, de Lint pulls it off beautifully, and it ... Read More


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - This is the book
This is the book that made me fall in love with the Newford characters. I picked it up as an advanced reader's copy at work (I of course work at a bookstore). I didn't think i'd like it to be honest but the cover art drew me in. I was bored one night and started reading it, before I knew it I had read a hundred some pages and it was 2 in the morning! If you're in the market to start reading Charles De Lint. Start with this one. It's entertaining and even though it's not suspense it keeps you on the edge of your seat just waiting what will happen next. It's extremely well paced - no dry spots. Even though this is actually the sequel to Onion Girl I would suggest reading this one first, it explains the reader's digest version of what happened in Onion Girl without making you feel as though you're missing anything. Then go back and read Onion Girl. I suggest this because Onion Girl has the most characters in any book i've ever seen and if you're already familiar with just a few of those characters it makes it so much easier. Jilly (the main character) is so easy to connect with, you'll love her. ;)

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