Violet's Reviews > The Onion Girl

There are some worlds that an author develops so heavily, so intricately that they always seem to find a story hidden within. These stories gather in different novels, connected but separate. It mimics the real world and the connections between real people, real stories.

That’s what The Onion Girl does. Despite the fantastic elements, at its heart it is a single realistic story within elaborate world.

The novel takes place in De Lint’s Newton, a seemingly normal North American town where magic hides in the corner of people’s eyes and in their dreams. Jilly is a reoccurring character within this world. An artist and an exuberant open-mind, inside she’s hiding a deep “old hurt” from her childhood. After she gets seriously injured in a hit-and-run, this “old hurt” raises its ugly head as she tries to escape her injuries in the dreamlands.

I’ve never read any of De Lint’s other Newton novels. Even so, I could tell that there a whole history that I was missing. There were so many names mentioned, so many slight references made that I just knew that there was more. It made me feel left out in the beginning, but after a while that didn’t really matter all that much. In the end, the story is singular and mostly self-contained.

On a smaller level, De Lint does tend to add tangential paragraph here and there, waxing on about this detail or that. Those are easily overlooked, though, especially in the light of his rich and well-rounded characters.

As detailed as Newton, these fictional people are what drew me in. I particularly held a sort of gothic fascination with the childhood trauma and consequences endured by Jilly and others. It’s the kind of grotesque curiosity that pulls people into crime shows and car crashes. That more than anything is what I take from the book. At times, the fantasy aspects were only side details, plot devices, to the story of these messy, complicated lives. Take them out and, in some ways, the novel would still be compelling.

It’s the reality behind the fiction that does this. These characters seem real, and they act real. No perfect endings, here. Hallmark and Disney have had no influence.

I don’t know what De Lint’s other novels are like, but if they’re anything like this one, then I might just pick them up for a read. They all live in the same world after all. There are many characters within in this story that I wouldn’t mind seeing again, even if they’re only loosely connected like people are in real life.