Rating: 
Summary: I love this book
Review: The young girl in "Pain Management" by Andrew Vachss is very involved with books by Charles de Lint. Vachss is a wonderful writer in many ways - one of which is that his characters listen to REAL music and REAL books. I followed Vachss's lead and bought (and fell in love with) Judy Henske, so I continued on, and bought a few de Lint books.I don't have the words to tell you how wonderful "Moonlight and Vines" is. That would be like my telling you that a baby's first steps are "wonderful." This is a collection of short stories whose characters continue to weave a delicate connection of lace from story to story. The city is the same throughout. It's a hard city filled with gentle souls. From "I envy the music that lovers hear," the first line of the first story, I was HOOKED. When I have time, I read a book a day. Please, look at the other books I've reviewed. I've read enough books to be able to base an opinion on what is good and what is bad. This, my friends, is the best book I have read in a long time. Best. Superlative. In our current scary times, it's wonderful to be able to escape to a place where everything sure isn't perfect, but where there are good people.
Rating: 
Summary: The search for magic continues
Review: _Moonlight and Vines_ is a well-written collection of stories, set in a modern city, intended to give the reader a sense of wonder, and make us believe that there is magic afoot, even in our most run-down urban slums. Charles de Lint is wonderful at treading that line between fantasy and realism, where we wonder right along with the characters, "what is real?" That is his biggest talent; his biggest flaw is trying too hard to insert a moral into each of these stories. They all seem to be making a point. Sometimes this is annoying; sometimes the story is so good I don't mind at all. Still, I would have given the book three stars, since the moralizing tends to place an artificial distance between the reader and the story. Then I read "Birds". My favorite story in the anthology, it deals with two young women's search for peace of mind, and the rituals they use to find it. De Lint has captured the very essence of magic and of personal ritual. I'm a pagan/witchy type, and I've read so many formulaic lists of "spell ingredients" I could puke; de Lint's description of the women's search for certain objects of personal value is right on the money. I want to copy the whole darn story into my BOS.
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