This is the closest de Lint has come to writing a sequel to any of his Newford novels; it takes place two years after the events in The Onion Girl and finishes Jilly's story. Still, it isn't absolutely necessary to have read The Onion Girl first; de Lint does a decent job of catching new readers up.
As with The Onion Girl, the thing that takes me the most by surprise is that the returning characters hold less interest than the new characters for me. I was involved with Lizzie from her very first chapter as narrator, but it took until mid-way through the book for me to particularly care what was happening with Jilly and Geordie -- even though when they were new characters in the stories in Dreams Underfoot they were two of my favorite characters. Part of it may simply be that I'm tired of de Lint's descriptions of his regular characters -- Jilly is always messy, petite, with masses of tangled hair and a perpetual smile, which is a great description the first time you see it in a short story, but by the time she's been the focus of two novels and appeared in dozens of other stories the description is getting rather hackneyed. The same goes for Geordie, Joe, and Cassie in Widdershins -- I've just heard them described way too many times by now and it's always exactly the same no matter what other character is describing them.
Still, by halfway through I was invested in all of the characters (with the exception of Galfreya who seemed like a wasted viewpoint), and the story was moving along briskly. Then the other major problem with Widdershins became apparent: de Lint simply had too many moving pieces in this novel. By the halfway point the plot felt poised on the brink of the climax -- buffalo cousins living and dead had massed in between and had brought out the war drums and everyone else was scrambling to find some way to stop it. I could feel the tension permeating the novel -- until that was followed with over 100 pages of jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint to get all the characters who needed to be there in position, which totally wrecked the tension, so that by the time the showdown occurred I was totally taken out of the story. Pacing is commonly a problem with novels that have such large casts of viewpoint characters, and de Lint does not overcome it here.
Still, despite those two (fairly sizable) issues, I liked Widdershins better than The Onion Girl. It does conclude Jilly's story happily, it introduces us to more cousins (always my favorite parts of de Lint stories), and despite the pacing issues it has more action than The Onion Girl did, more jeopardy for everyone involved, so it feels like a more rounded out novel. Definitely recommended for de Lint fans.
As with The Onion Girl, the thing that takes me the most by surprise is that the returning characters hold less interest than the new characters for me. I was involved with Lizzie from her very first chapter as narrator, but it took until mid-way through the book for me to particularly care what was happening with Jilly and Geordie -- even though when they were new characters in the stories in Dreams Underfoot they were two of my favorite characters. Part of it may simply be that I'm tired of de Lint's descriptions of his regular characters -- Jilly is always messy, petite, with masses of tangled hair and a perpetual smile, which is a great description the first time you see it in a short story, but by the time she's been the focus of two novels and appeared in dozens of other stories the description is getting rather hackneyed. The same goes for Geordie, Joe, and Cassie in Widdershins -- I've just heard them described way too many times by now and it's always exactly the same no matter what other character is describing them.
Still, by halfway through I was invested in all of the characters (with the exception of Galfreya who seemed like a wasted viewpoint), and the story was moving along briskly. Then the other major problem with Widdershins became apparent: de Lint simply had too many moving pieces in this novel. By the halfway point the plot felt poised on the brink of the climax -- buffalo cousins living and dead had massed in between and had brought out the war drums and everyone else was scrambling to find some way to stop it. I could feel the tension permeating the novel -- until that was followed with over 100 pages of jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint to get all the characters who needed to be there in position, which totally wrecked the tension, so that by the time the showdown occurred I was totally taken out of the story. Pacing is commonly a problem with novels that have such large casts of viewpoint characters, and de Lint does not overcome it here.
Still, despite those two (fairly sizable) issues, I liked Widdershins better than The Onion Girl. It does conclude Jilly's story happily, it introduces us to more cousins (always my favorite parts of de Lint stories), and despite the pacing issues it has more action than The Onion Girl did, more jeopardy for everyone involved, so it feels like a more rounded out novel. Definitely recommended for de Lint fans.
