I’m an onion girl,” says Jilly Coppercorn, the chipper star of Charles De Lint’s sequence of fantasy novels set in the fictional city of Newford (think “a magical Ottawa”). Jilly is also the protagonist of his new novel, The Onion Girl. Jilly is sweet. Jilly’s suffered and become even kinder and sweeter for it all. Jilly also sees fairies and a magical alternative world, and Jilly’s paintings of that world are beautiful and popular.
Jilly’s so cloyingly good you could just kill her, so it comes as no surprise when somebody with a truck runs her over and leaves her broken body by the roadside. Someone has also broken into Jilly’s studio and systematically trashed all of her paintings. As Jilly lies helpless in a hospital bed, her magical allies tell her that she must peel back the layers of herself to uncover the hidden pain that’s keeping her body from mending.
The Onion Girl is more than a novel of inner layers. Jilly has an alter ego, her younger sister Raylene, a tough-talking, knife-wielding bitch who pulls no punches. Raylene has learned some spirit-world tricks of her own, and she’s coming after Jilly for abandoning Raylene to their sexually abusive brother. By the time Jilly Coppercorn and her Ms. Hyde sister do meet, the stakes are so high that the pages fairly crackle.
De Lint delivers his customary rich stew of contemporary urban life and various traditional folklores. The magical world that parallels and intersects with Newford is richly evoked, and the novel abounds with tricksters, fairies, old gods, and eerie bottle trees. Sometimes the multicultural blend of mythic traditions feels a tad glossy and forced, but it’s a delight to read fiction that remembers that all the cultures of a city have imaginative worlds of their own.