Drink Down the Moon by Charles de Lint
250 pages
Published 1990
Read from February 22 to February 23
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
So I was wrong when, in my review of Jack the Giant-Killer, I said that no library in Suffolk County had a copy of its sequel. I found Drink Down the Moon in an omnibus edition called Jack of Kinrowan, held by a lone library in Southampton. I'm glad I tracked it down: while not leaps and bounds superior to the first volume, and held back by many of the same urban fantasy cliches as its predecessor, Moon is livelier and somehow, for the most part, just a lot more enjoyable. De Lint's Ottawa novels (are there more than these two?) will always seem to me like knock-off Canadian versions of Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, which made faery infiltration of the local music scene seem much less corny and cliched than de Lint has ever managed, but Moon, at least, can stand on its own merits. Well, at least until the underwhelming undoing of its central villain, who only seemed like a moderately interesting variant on the usual sardonic evil wizard when he appeared tough to beat, and became a whole lot less interesting when the means of defeating him clicked (I accidentally typed "cliched" -- perhaps I should have left it like that) into place.
On a personal note, while the title makes perfect sense in context, I'm still a little disappointed that this book has nothing whatsoever to do with the traditional ballad sometimes recorded under that name.
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