Customer Reviews

The Mystery of Grace

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

De Lint writes some of the finest urban fantasy around -- character driven, mystical, and with a deep faith in humanity's goodness. This foray into the Southwest lacks the depth of his Newford stories. Grace, his main character, has interesting quirks, but never attains the depth of some of his earlier heroines. Having found three unusual characteristics -- tattoos, hot rods and rockabilly -- De Lint seems to never quite get beyond them and, in fact, repeats these characteristics over and over again. The mystical qualities of life after death and the essences of faith, family and friendship are, as usual, fascinating and the ending remains a mystery (as it should). All the wonderful ambiguities of our humanity are here, but Grace lacks the strength to carry them on her own.
I recommend it to his fans, but it's not the best first novel for a newcomer to DeLint's work.

Charles de Lint is one of my favorite authors. I have been anxiously anticipating this newest novel, and I was not disappointed. I enjoyed that CdL explored a different world than he usually does, but he stayed true to the urban fantasy genre. He also wrote about many of the themes he has tackled in the past - mystery, spirit, grace, hope, and one of the big questions - what happens when we die?

I somewhat agree with the other reviewer who said that Grace is somewhat one (three) -dimensional. You feel for her situation, and you feel for John, but you don't LOVE either of them, like you do with Jilly or some of CdL's other characters.

I gave "Grace" four stars instead of five because it's not as powerful as some of his other work, but it's a great book.

There is a blurb on this book by Alice Hoffman. She said "Nobody does it better".
I don't usually put much stock in these author blurbs, but I have to say that I agree with this one.
I don't remember how I found Charles De Lint, but I am grateful that I did, because as Ms Hoffman says, nobody does it better.

This is the story of Grace. It is a story of live and love and faith, or the loss of it.
It is a story of friendship and commitment and death. Most of all, it is a story that reminds us, as do all of De Lint's books of the magic within us all.

Grace with her tattoos and her grease and her family, the good and the bad,, is each one of us. Grace is more aptly named than you might think at first look. Grace learns to open her heart wider than she ever believed that she could, and see truth.

This is yet another must read in a long line of must reads by this magical author.

I bought this book because I'm a devoted fan of Charles deLint's work. However, I was disappointed in this work. First off, the story reminded me too much of "Promises to Keep" which I had only read a few months before -- what with the whole escape-this-afterlife theme. So, it did not feel fresh to me.

In addition, I didn't get the sense that the romance between Grace and John was real. And that storyline had just too pat an ending.

None of the characters in the book seemed nearly as developed as the Newford contingent.

If you're new to DeLint, he has better work out there -- any of the Newford short story collections, Blue Girl (YA fiction) or, my own personal fave and intro to DeLint: Memory and Dream.

I preordered this book and as the reviews started to pop up, I started to get nervous. Did I make a mistake? Has DeLint lost that magic touch? So I stuck the book on my shelf and went on. I made a vow not to buy a book all summer to save money and read the books left to collect dust. So off the shelf it came, much to my delight.

I LOVED this book, are there things I would change, of course; would I have wished it longer, without a doubt. But this is classic DeLint and I recommend it to anyone who loves this author.

But please don't start with this book; start with an earlier book from the Newford series. I can see how people would be disappointed in the book, I would have been tempted to compare Grace to Jilly and be disappointed as well. But if you are open minded and let the book stand on its own without comparisons, I doubt it will disappoint you. At the end of a really amazing fiction book I expect a wanting feeling, to want more pages and not be forced to put the book down for another. Luckily I got that feeling with The Mystery of Grace and I hope you do too.

John Burns does something he never does...on Halloween night, he meets an alluring Hispanic woman at a Halloween party and takes her back to his home for a one night stand...it's a beautiful night and John is captivated by the lovely Grace Quintaro But in the morning when Grace gets up to go to the bathroom, she mysteriously disappears into thin air. There's a reason for that...Grace is dead!

Grace is killed in a botched holdup attempt in a convenience store and yet she finds herself in a strange limbo between Heaven and Hell, where her neighborhood in completely intact and yet strangely different. There are other dead people there. Grace learns that when you die in this neighborhood, the building you died in becomes part of the new landscape. Thus Grace brings the convenience story with her. For some reason her apartment complex seems to be the center of this world. She also finds out that she can crossover to the land of the living twice a year...at Halloween and in the Spring. Now Grace intends to find out what the mystery is of this strange world and her connection to John.

De Lint crafts a haunting mix of mystery and romance. What connection does John have to Grace and what does it have to do with the death of John's brother? His limbo realm is fascinating. When you die, the place you died in comes with you, or, if it was already in this in-between world, it gets modernized to the time you died. There's also the creepy sleeper people, people who have given up trying to "live" in limbo and just slip into unconsciousness, eventually to drift away. De Lint sets the story in a southern Californian Latino community, where Grace worked building and repairing hotrods and there's a deep religious faith to the story although the ending is not quite what I expected.

I have read a ton of Charles de Lint books and really loved his Newford books. I was eager to read one of his more recent novels. This book is okay but lacks a lot of the magic of his Newford books and is pretty slow at certain parts. I listened to this on audio book and the audio book was very well done.

Grace is a very tattooed gearhead that enjoys working on cars with her grandfather. When her grandfather dies she recedes some from her friends and by some strange fate ends up getting shot in the local grocery store. After getting shot she wakes up in her apartment where an old woman is standing over her letting her know she's dead. Grace is in a kind of in between place where the people who die in a six block area surrounding her apartment find themselves, kind of a limbo. They can return to the "real world" twice year. While back in the real world Grace meets someone special, and while yearning to see him again she struggles to solve the mystery of why the souls are trapped in this limbo.

Grace and all of the other characters introduced are likable and believable. They are all kind characters, except for the obvious "bad guy", and all strive to make the most out of their lives in limbo. The idea of having a location have this kind of limbo-world for souls is interesting and creative and de Lint ties it to a lot of mexican/native american mythology.

My biggest problem with this book is the pacing. It takes too long for Grace to get to limbo and once she is there it takes too long before she actually does something. I understand de Lint was trying to give us a sense of boredom that Grace experienced and convey the passage of time, I just wish he would have done it in a way that didn't bore me as a reader.

SPOILER ALERT (although I tried to make it as non-spoiler as I could)
Also there are some things that happen in the plot that seem to happen for basically no reason. For example John, the guy Grace meets has some premonition about not seeing her again. After that he is pretty much cut out of the story. I mean Grace doesn't even mention him a ton after that, which is odd considering her attachment to him. Then when her friend in limbo mentions that a Juan (John) is needed to break the evil spirit you expect John to play into it somehow...only he doesn't. After a while I began to wonder why John's story was even included. Really besides the catalyst it provides to make Grace gain thecourage to fight the evil spirit, he doesn't ultimately play that big of a part in the story.
SPOILER END

At the end of the book you kind of feel let down. There is all this build up and then not much ever happens. The main storyline is resolved, but not in a way that surprises or in a way that is ironic.

Overall, a creative idea but definitely not the most magical of De Lint's works. The pacing is poor and some parts are just plain boring. If you are interested in reading de Lint and are a newcomer to his works I would recommend Moonheart and Spiritwalk (or basically any other book of his) over this book.

Charles De Lint "The Mystery of Grace" kept me entertained all the way to the end, which is why I gave it 4 stars. It seems that I lose interest in a lot of urban fantasies at some point and then don't have enough interest to finish them, probably because they are cliches based on cliches.

The strength of "The Mystery of Grace" is that there is a bona fide mystery in the story that I wanted explained, namely why does Grace's after-life world only extend several blocks from the Alverson Arms apartment where she lived before her death. This mystery does get explained and resolved in a satisfactory way.

A further strength is de Lint's use of the Southwest as the setting for the development of the characters and their worldview, which includes abuelos and saints and Our Lady of Altagracia.

The opening was very effective, where de Lint set up the mystery of the disappearing tattooed girl.

Finally, de Lint is technically a good writer, and his prose is satisfying and pleasant to follow.

On the other hand, the story was disappointing in the mundaneness of life after death. When Grace returns for her twice a year jaunt, when the spirits haunt the living, it's not very haunting, and Grace is the same person she was before she died. I take it that the banality of the supernatural world followed from de Lint's decision to write the story from Grace's perspective. It is undoubtedly very hard (or impossible) to write a story where the first person narrator is mysterious and spooky to herself.

Likewise, de Lint's nods to multi-culturalism, where everyone is right in their understanding of the mystery of life, so long as they believe in their own faith, to me strenthened the shallowness of Grace's after-life world - it was as if we are finally given the answer to the great mystery of life after death and find out that the answer is the slogan "do your own thing." For example the scene where the residents of the Alverson Arms world confront the McGuffin of the story with their own objects of faith, which for one person - an atheist, I assume - was a copy of Darwin's Descent of Man for me pointed to the problem of a contentless supernatural world, i.e., for heaven's sake, this guy is dead, and he has empirical, experiential proof of a reality beyond the material world, and he is still an atheist?

De Lint was much better, in my opinion, when he was writing from the perspective of the Grace and Conchita's folk Catholicism, because at least, then, there seemed to be some rules for the supernatural world that might have provided a depth and texture to that world. At least when Grace was asking for Our Lady's protection, I had a sense of a mysterious supernatural world that beckoned to my imagination.

Nonetheless, it was a fun book and I felt that I got my money's worth of entertainment value from it.

i love delint, but he is uneven, and he's been particularly uneven for his last couple of novels. i was really fearing that he had lost his mojo.

in this book, he invents a new city somewhere in the southwest, and at first i had high hopes. and really, it's not bad. but it doesn't reach the magical place that his best books do. it was an odd story sort of about the afterlife and involving a rather unconvincing romance.

it read like something that should have been a short story instead of being stretched into a novel. it would have made a really good short story, and the setting might make for a good collection of stories, like his early Newford stories.

it had potential but it only sort of half reached it. maybe he'll try to work something more out of this new fictional place ... but maybe he should do what he did with Newford and keep it to short stories until he has worked out the place better in his head.

I was highly anticipating this most recent work by de Lint. I had pre-ordered it months ago and was looking forward to it when I got it. However, this is one of the most disappointing books I've read in awhile. Perhaps because I enjoy de Lint's books so much, I may hold him to a higher standard, but this was just not a great read. While the story line is interesting, the characters are not super well-developed or rich like those in other books. Furthermore, as noted by some of the other reviewers here, there is quite a bit of repetition here. We are fairly bludgeoned with the fact that Grace is tattooed, likes hot rods, and likes rockabilly. And I found myself wincing every time I read the phrase "after a beat" or "paused a beat," as in "she paused a beat and then laughed." It's kind of an odd phrase and to use it over and over throughout the book, it was like nails on a chalkboard each time I encountered it.

I deeply hope that this is only a fluke--hey, not every one can be a homerun, right--and that de Lint returns to his great writing.