Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection

Rating:
Summary: A fantasic collection
Review: Welcome to Newford, an average North American town. Well, maybe at first glance, but by the second, there is a little more than meets the eye. Meet Jilly, a strong independant woman who seems like she knows everyone and maybe a witch? Meran, is she wholey human? Geordie, an average joe, who thinks he met the woman of his dreams.

I really loved this book. There was soo many good stories, that it made it really hard to put the book down.

de Lint has a way of really coming across as a natural thought or natural flow of a story. Which is why this book is so involving to read, because this could be me and just maybe that knock on the wall isn't just the wind blowing the tree. Some of these stories kinda made it a little hard to sleep!

My favorite theme of these collection is the fact that our lives weave together with others as we live indepentantly. You meet one character learn a little, and than meet them six stories on. This auroa of magic that lays just beneath the sight of most people is just overwhelming. Makes life a little more interesting.

Enjoy Newford, because once you visit, Newford has left a little bit of it in you.

Rating:
Summary: A fantasic collection
Review: Welcome to Newford, an average North American town. Well, maybe at first glance, but by the second, there is a little more than meets the eye. Meet Jilly, a strong independant woman who seems like she knows everyone and maybe a witch? Meran, is she wholey human? Geordie, an average joe, who thinks he met the woman of his dreams.

I really loved this book. There was soo many good stories, that it made it really hard to put the book down.

de Lint has a way of really coming across as a natural thought or natural flow of a story. Which is why this book is so involving to read, because this could be me and just maybe that knock on the wall isn't just the wind blowing the tree. Some of these stories kinda made it a little hard to sleep!

My favorite theme of these collection is the fact that our lives weave together with others as we live indepentantly. You meet one character learn a little, and than meet them six stories on. This auroa of magic that lays just beneath the sight of most people is just overwhelming. Makes life a little more interesting.

Enjoy Newford, because once you visit, Newford has left a little bit of it in you.

Rating:
Summary: A Promise Broken
Review: What a great title, laden with the promise of darkness,mystery, surreality... it leads one to expect a fanatasy with a subterranean feel. Unfortunately the book does not live up to the promise its title makes.

Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint is an ambitious collection of urban faery stories, all bound together by several common threads and characters. But several factors hold these stories back from being all that they can be.

At first one is enchanted with, if not de Lint's somewhat lackluster prose, at least by the unique themes and plotlines. Unique up until the third or fourth story, that is, when one begins to realize the sad sameness of all these tales. After the first few stories the book becomes a rather tedious read, and one's willingness to forgive de Lint's unremarkable writing style dissipates, like ghosts fleeing daylight.

I can see what de Lint is trying to do with the characters. veiling the extraordinary behind a veneer of ordinariness. Most everyone in the books has brown hair - this seems to be his concept of ordinary. But all the women are pretty and petit - because everyone knows fat bowsers never experience anything supernatural I guess. He's only a little more diverse with the males he portrays; they come off just faintly more realistic than his impossible women. The problem with his characters is not that they are not complex and interesting, its that the devices he uses to make them complex and interesting are so transparent and obvious. One can actually see his formulae for character creation laid out on the page like algebra, and it feels like being cheated.

De Lint flirts a lot with the themes of poverty and homelessness, but he writes it insincerely, romanticizing it shamelessly, and comes off like the proud bearer of white liberal guilt, rather than someone who's been there. I think he wants his ghetto, the 'Tombs', to read like some bitterly cruel otherworld, but it comes off like a series of cardboard cutouts, a rough facade.

It was an interesting enough idea to set his stories in an invented Canadian town. One doesn't see it everyday. But try as he might he never quite manages to make the town seem real enough. And he just doesn't make Canada spooky enough.

Dreams Underfoot is a great idea that would have been better written by someone else.