My second book

I just finished Spirits in the Wires by Charles de Lint. De Lint is one of my favorite authors. He has a way of making his characters and their stories come to life, of drawing the reader into the worlds he creates.

That’s why, when this utterly failed to happen in this book for me, I was disappointed. Oh, I liked a lot of the characters, and they were drawn passably well. But none of them clicked.

Spirits in the Wires is set in de Lint’s city of Newford. If you want an introduction to Newford and its denizens, this book is not the one you want to read. In fact, one of its flaws was that de Lint was overly fond of referencing his other characters in this book when they had no relevance whatsoever to the story at hand. Yes, it’s nice to occasionally have references to events outside of what’s important to the story, but not to the extent De Lint did it in SITW.

The premise of the story was interesting, though. Writer Christie Riddell is dating a woman, Saskia, who was born in a website. We meet Saskia talking to Christie’s shadow, Christiana, who is all of the bits of Christie’s personality he didn’t want and cast off when he was seven years old. A virus takes down a popular website, the Wordwood, and people start disappearing from in front of their computers, including Saskia. Thus it’s up to Christie and several of his friends (a good fourth of whom really could have had a lot less screen time without taking anything away at all) to go rescue them, which involves traveling through the mysterious Borderlands and into the Internet.

Fascinating premise, as I said, but the execusion leaves a lot to be desired, and de Lint can do a lot better. Someplace to be Flying is a much better introduction to Newford and its characters than this book.

Rating: 72/100

Incidentally, I got my copy of the book from here in case anyone likes the idea of finding cheap unabridged audiobooks on the Internet.