Reviews

Waifs and Strays by Charles de Lint

velvet15's review

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious medium-paced

• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

macroscopicentric's review

fast-paced

• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I read and loved a lot of Charles de Lint as a teenager; he was probably my most influential author at the time. But as I've grown up my tastes have changed and it's been harder to ignore the flaws in his storytelling. Specifically, despite the fact that there is some diversity in his characters, it doesn't feel like true inclusion. Everyone is white by default, and only the skintones of the characters of color are mentioned. In addition, most of the characters of color (see: Bones, Shirley Jones) are racial stereotypes rather than full characters. (Not in this book, but there's also some appropriation of Native American mythology and imagery in other books.) "Gypsy," a slur, is used at least once to describe an aesthetic and not a Romani character. There's some casual whorephobia. There are no canonically queer characters in the entire book, despite having a lot of artistic and musical communities where a queer character would be a perfect fit.

de Lint does do some things really well; he's always been an expert at stories about lost and/or quietly uncorruptable characters, and his urban fantasy settings are consistently wonderful. "There's No Such Thing" and "Sisters" remain some of my all-time favorite vampire stories. And I've always loved his rotating ensemble cast in Newford. But I've gotten used to seeing more of myself, and less reductive depictions of marginalized groups, in the fiction I read, and I think I'm ready to move on.