Thursday, September 11, 2014

Book Review: Jack the Giant Killer

I think I'm just on a roll with my Charles de Lint reading right now.

Last month I read Yarrow and absolutely loved it - the merging of high fantasy (completely new world) and magic realism (wherein magical events happen in our world), was just incredible, and the characters were becoming incredibly strong, three-dimensional people that I would either love to meet, or in the cases of the villain, found intriguing.

…and then I hit Jack the Giant Killer.

This book is absolutely brilliant, it takes concepts from fairy tales and specifically merges them with modern day (well, 1987) Ottawa - which was amazing, and then begins to hint that the Ottawa of Jack the Giant Killer is also the Ottawa of Moonheart - just in a quick reference to a physical location, but still, this is the kind of stuff I get excited about when reading Terry Pratchett or Stephen King.

The novel focuses on a girl named Jackie Rowan, who ends up becoming the "Jack" in a fairy tale, which is both a lot of fun with gender-swapping the traditional role, and bringing forth an incredibly fun character, also Jackie starts doing things that may not work exactly in traditional fairy tales, but make a heck of a lot of sense if strange magic stuff started happening around a real person - like telling her best friend.

This book is great.  I spent almost half the story smiling and the other half really anxious about what was going to happen to this great character.

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