Review: The Wind in His Heart

The Wind in His Heart by Charles de Lint
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love de Lint's work, and this is genuinely quite good... but it's not his best book. I think much of what I like about him normally is the way he makes you genuinely believe in the reactions of his characters - often encountering elements of magic in their world for the first time. And yet this time I kind of failed to believe. Apart from the odd moment of someone commenting that they're a little bit freaked out, I never really believed that I was looking at someonehaving the entire underpinnings of their model of the universe ripped out from beneath them. They all pretty much take it in stride, which gives it less emotional impact on me.

He does an excellent job (I thought, from the point of view of someone who has lived _near_ the Navajo res, but never experienced tribal life from the inside) of depicting the culture of a modern Native American tribe, with it's deep links to the past but also it's grounding in modern problems.

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