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Okay, so this is a little bit of a way to fluff up my GoodReads goal progress - I intentionally got the omnibus edition so I could count all three included books towards my goal as well as the omnibus itself. 100 books in a year, here I come!
That said, and somewhat oddly, I actually have slightly different feelings towards the whole edition than I did toward the individual books, each of which I gave four stars out of five (as I found them well-written and enjoyable but not particularly emotionally involving).
There wasn't any one great "wow" moment that sent chills down my spine, as there usually is with books that grab me enough for an "A" rating. But while this book is long and has a *lot* of stories (some of which, as is always the case with short-story collections, are better than others), it never felt like I was slogging through it. Quite the reverse, in fact - if I went a day or two without reading some of it, I started to miss these characters and this world that Mr. de Lint had created.
And that, I think, is ultimately the real triumph of this series, and these stories especially. de Lint writes authentically about people on the fringes of society - minorities dealing with cross-cultural issues, artists and musicians scraping out a living, homeless people with far more complex histories and inner lives than society at large would ascribe to them. But even when the stories are darker in theme (and many of them are), there are moments of humor and hope, expressions of humanity that make the characters more than two-dimensional renderings. Eventually, these moments add up to a real place populated by real people - a place some ways away, perhaps, with friends you don't see often, but that doesn't mean you don't love reading about what they're up to these days. A
Personal side note: I can't believe I missed these stories back in the 90s, when the majority of them were written. They fit pretty solidly into the...paradigm (for lack of a better term) of the crowd my mother and I hung out with when I was a teenager; I'd be surprised if more than a few of our social circle at the time weren't readers. That said, reading them was an entertaining trip through the attitudes and worldview I remember at the time, and dug up some sweet memories I'd thought long forgotten.
That said, and somewhat oddly, I actually have slightly different feelings towards the whole edition than I did toward the individual books, each of which I gave four stars out of five (as I found them well-written and enjoyable but not particularly emotionally involving).
There wasn't any one great "wow" moment that sent chills down my spine, as there usually is with books that grab me enough for an "A" rating. But while this book is long and has a *lot* of stories (some of which, as is always the case with short-story collections, are better than others), it never felt like I was slogging through it. Quite the reverse, in fact - if I went a day or two without reading some of it, I started to miss these characters and this world that Mr. de Lint had created.
And that, I think, is ultimately the real triumph of this series, and these stories especially. de Lint writes authentically about people on the fringes of society - minorities dealing with cross-cultural issues, artists and musicians scraping out a living, homeless people with far more complex histories and inner lives than society at large would ascribe to them. But even when the stories are darker in theme (and many of them are), there are moments of humor and hope, expressions of humanity that make the characters more than two-dimensional renderings. Eventually, these moments add up to a real place populated by real people - a place some ways away, perhaps, with friends you don't see often, but that doesn't mean you don't love reading about what they're up to these days. A
Personal side note: I can't believe I missed these stories back in the 90s, when the majority of them were written. They fit pretty solidly into the...paradigm (for lack of a better term) of the crowd my mother and I hung out with when I was a teenager; I'd be surprised if more than a few of our social circle at the time weren't readers. That said, reading them was an entertaining trip through the attitudes and worldview I remember at the time, and dug up some sweet memories I'd thought long forgotten.
