It’s been quite a while since I’ve read “The Onion Girl”, the previous book in the long-running Newford series of novels. That book left Jilly Coppercorn recovering from a horrible accident and still broken in a number of ways, all stretching back to her incredibly abusive childhood. It was a difficult place to leave the characters, to say the least.
This novel is largely a direct extension of that previous Newford novel, dealing with the details of Jilly’s recovery and her relationship with another long-standing character, Geordie Riddell. The two of them have been circling each other from the very beginning, and it’s about time that the topic was covered. Combining it with the moment of Jilly’s emotional and psychological recovery was a great move. In fact, by the end of the book, it feels like the author is bringing the Newford saga to a close, giving most of the recurring characters a fond and relatively happy farewell.
The hook into that story actually involves a cast of minor characters, especially Lizzie. Lizzie and her band, despite the length of the novel, feel somewhat undeveloped. This is unfortunate, since there are certain character beats within the story that would be much better if we knew Lizzie more completely. Instead, Lizzie and the others feel like stereotypical de Lint characters, deeply rooted in the Celtic musical scene.
The author also chose to shift between past and present tense without warning, on top of an odd penchant for switching between first- and third-person. This interrupts the flow of the novel, constantly forcing the reader to adjust. I’m not sure why de Lint chose to employ such a writing style, but over the course of 560 pages, it gets tedious.
Rating: 8/10
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