Book Review: Spirits in the Wires

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

Spirits in the Wires     Amazon US HC Amazon Canada HC
Charles DeLint
Class/Genre:   Fantasy
Tor, Aug 2003, $27.95, 448 pp.

Book editor Aaron Goldstein is irate by the slight he received from Christiana Tree, whose "birth" came when Christy turned seven and rejected parts of his personality. Already a nasty person, the angry Aaron forces a hacker to place a virus in Christiana’s favorite website Wordwood. The repercussions of his actions go way beyond that of destroying a web locale, as Wordwood is a place that exists in that ethereal limbo between computers. Thus people vanish including Saskia Madding, the girlfriend of Christy Riddell.

Christiana feels that she has been assigned a quest to save Wordwood, find the lost souls, and relocate Saskia in her own body. To do this they must leave the realm of the generally accepted reality and enter the spirit ether of the Internet spirit world,

Charles De Lint is at his best with this incredible modern day fantasy that focuses on technological mumbo jumbo to computer illiterates like moi who feels that though it is weirdly impossible it works. The story line is loaded with action and intelligent characters that through the quest learn a key natural law that in a moral society; it is not one’s genes, but what one does and how one behaves today that matters. This is a great work by the one of the top fantasy authors of the twenty-first century.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner