Charlotte Kersten

Year published: 2001

Categories: Adult, urban fantasy

Summary: In novel after novel, and story after story, Charles de Lint has brought an entire imaginary North American city to vivid life. Newford: where magic lights dark streets; where myths walk clothed in modern shapes; where a broad cast of extraordinary and affecting people work to keep the whole world turning.

At the center of all the entwined lives in Newford stands a young artist named Jilly Coppercorn, with her tangled hair, her paint-splattered jeans, a smile perpetually on her lips–Jilly, whose paintings capture the hidden beings that dwell in the city’s shadows. Now, at last, de Lint tells Jilly’s own story…for behind the painter’s fey charm lies a dark secret and a past she’s labored to forget. And that past is coming to claim her now.

“I’m the onion girl,” Jilly Coppercorn says. “Pull back the layers of my life, and you won’t find anything at the core. Just a broken child. A hollow girl.” She’s very, very good at running. But life has just forced Jilly to stop.

My Thoughts: In this book, Jilly’s story is told alongside her sister Raylene’s; Jilly was sexually abused by their brother before running away as a child, at which point their brother turned to abusing Raylene instead. Their lives took very different paths after that point, and then they reunited in this book.

My feelings about this one are very mixed. I’ve never read anything by Charles De Lint before, and I’m not totally sure his style is for me. To start off, book’s humor was not for me and made me cringe more than it made me smile or laugh. One example of many:

“You should tell Lou,” Wendy said. “It might be a clue.” She laughed. “I’m rhyming again.”
Sophie smiled. “Well, you are our resident poet.”
“I do try. Maybe I should become a DJ. Rappin’ Wendy, she’s really quite friendly.”

A running joke that really didn’t land for me was how horny Jilly’s gnome friend Toby was. The book was determined to mention that Toby got an erection nearly every time Jilly touched him, and he introduced himself to her by declaring that he had a penis…it’s one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever read, and it really did not work for me, particularly in a book trying to deal sensitively with the topic of Jilly’s healing from sexual violation.

It’s clear that the book’s heart is in the right place and I think it succeeds in a number of ways when dealing with the topic of trauma, but a few of its “message” moments felt just a little too on the nose for me, like they belonged on RAINN.org instead of in a fantasy novel:

“Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they’re not treating them as possessions or toys.”

“Jilly wanted to reach out and hold her, but knew too well how the physical contact of comfort could too easily be misconstrued as an invasion of the private space an abused victim sometimes so desperately needed to maintain.”

“She hadn’t had a brother who’d abuser her, a mother who’d deserted her, or any of the horrible things that seemed to have happened to two out of any three of the women they knew.”

I love that Jilly has created a new family for herself, and it’s very clear that their love and support are a huge part of why she was able to survive and thrive after her incredibly difficult early life. The actual friends themselves, however, tend to blur together into an indistinct mass of Really Nice People who were more or less interchangeable personality-wise. The main exception to this is her friend Joe, a Native American man who is able to traverse the Otherworld with a great deal of skill. Joe is probably the most interesting character in the book besides Raylene, and I wanted to point out this article analyzing how De Lint’s incorporation of indigenous mythologies evolved over the course of his work from being stereotypical to something more meaningful and respectful of indigenous sovereignty. It doesn’t talk about The Onion Girl specifically, but I thought it was a good read.

I don’t tend to enjoy urban fantasy as much as other kinds of fantasy, and I think this book helped me realize why that is – the magical elements that I love in fantasy feel more mundane to me in modern settings/when they come into contact with modern settings. The only real exception to this in The Onion Girl is probably the conversation that Jilly and Raylene had with Grace/Choice at the very end of the book, which felt properly wondrous and strange.

The strongest part of the story is Raylene’s portion by far. Her voice is distinct and unique and her cynical, tough-as-nails personality shines through during her life of crime and beyond. There’s a lot to her character, from her lifelong friendship with Pinky to her one good romantic relationship and the interest in programming that came from it. I wasn’t totally sure how I felt about the “lesson” that it seemed she was supposed to learn, which was to come to terms with the fact that the way her life turned out was her “own damn fault” instead of blaming everything on Jilly abandoning her.

But I think, ultimately, what De Lint is trying to convey is more complicated than that – at the very end of the book, Raylene had a conversation with the barkeep at the Inn of the Star-Crossed and he encouraged her to have compassion for herself, which turned out to be exactly what she needed to hear. Jilly said that she was lucky to have ended up in a better place than Raylene because she got help “like in a fairy tale” while Raylene didn’t, and Raylene ultimately realized that Jilly’s choice to run away was one made by a desperate child who should not be blamed for anything. They both ended up in a place beyond attributing the other fault or blame, and they seemed to realize that they each simply did the best that they could with what they were given at the time. Their complex relationship is definitely another of the book’s strengths, and it still wasn’t perfect by the end, which I really appreciate. There was definitely hope for Raylene’s future (and I loved that she rescued another girl from her town), and De Lint wrote this in a way that feels the opposite of disingenuous to me.

As a final note, the part of the story detailing Jilly’s early life and adult Jilly taking care of a pregnant runaway was actually a short story at first (and it featured in The Armless Maiden: And Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors, which I read earlier this year) and it was kind of obvious that it had just been awkwardly placed in the middle of this novel. De Lint said in his afterward that he did this because he simply didn’t feel that he could rewrite the horrible things that Jilly went through; I definitely understand this, but the result feels a little awkward. The other interesting thing about his afterward is that it features a ton of recommendations for the reading and music that inspired De Lint while he was writing.