When I was in Oakland last month I raided the stacks of galleys sitting around the office, and managed to find a couple books that caught my eye. One of those was the new Charles de Lint young adult novel, The Blue Girl. The book caught my eye for several reasons: first, I’ve liked a lot of de Lint’s work (though I’ve been a bit more reserved in my praise in recent years); second, it had a cool Cliff Nielsen cover that suggested it was edgier, punkier than his more recent work; and third, it was edited by my friend Sharyn, who has a singularly good eye for quality stuff, so it stood a good chance of being good.
I read the book in Oakland and on the plane between Boston and San Francisco and, to cut quickly to the chase, I thought it rated amongst de Lint’s better recent work. Imogene, the ‘blue girl’ of the title, is a very engaging protagonist. A teenager who has been in a lot of trouble, she opts to try to follow a smoother path when she and her mother and brother move to Newford, avoiding the rough crowd she’d been hanging out with, and befriending instead Maxine, an apparently very straight-laced, fiercely intelligent loner. As their friendship develops, a third character comes into the mix. Adrian is a ghost. He died several years earlier when he jumped off the roof of the local high school, and he has developed a huge crush on Imogene. Things begin to go awry when Imogene starts to see her childhood friend Pelly, and when Adrian tries to get her to see the fairies that haunt the school.
It all makes for an involving story, and for the most part I was well entertained by The Blue Girl, but there were some things that disappointed me. First of all, the book really isn’t much of a departure for de Lint. Like the rest of his later Newford work, it features members of his ongoing troupe of characters (in this case Christy Riddell), and is dominated by the same concerns about the protection of the innocent and the abuse of power which have preoccupied him of late. While those concerns and de Lint’s position on them are understandable and commendable, they also tend to wear his regular readers down a bit. De Lint, as good a writer as he can be, seems unable to escape the weight of the message that he is trying to deliver, and often ends up making that something of a burden for the reader too. More tiresomely, he continues to attempt to communicate his personal enchantment with the numinous nature of creativity in his work. Writers, artists and such, we are left in no doubt, are in touch with something special, and in some sense are more blessed than the rest of us. It all ends up seeming just a bit twee.
I realise it’s not for casual commentators like your faithful correspondent to suggest such things, but it seems to me that de Lint could do with a change of venue. Where someone like Terry Pratchett seems to find his Discworld an endless source of inspiration, it’s beginning to look like Newford and its populace are increasingly a burden for de Lint, pushing him out of the groove that gave us work like Memory and Dream, and into a real rut. It’d be refreshing to see him set all of that to one side for a while and just try to write the kind of pure, unencumbered stories that he’s so capable of, and which helped make his name.
That said, de Lint is good at what he does and, as I say above, The Blue Girl is amongst his better work of late. For that reason alone it’s worth checking out, and is probably one of the better YA fantasies of the year.