A remark on Little (Grrl) LOST

I love Charles de Lint's writing. I've read almost all of it, and buy more whenever it's available. I get his newsletter and visit his website.

And that's why it feels so strange to write this post.

This morning I finished his new novel, Little (Grrl) LOST. It's quite good (not his best, but I read it straight through). It's the story of two teenage girls, T.J. and Elizabeth, one human and one not, in de Lint's city of Newford. It's told in seven sections, TTETETE, the Ts in limited third-person pov using past tense (T.J.) and the Es in first-person pov using narrative present* (Elizabeth (of course)). There's nothing strange about this sort of structure, of course; using different voices is a usual, and good, way of making sure the reader can tell whose part of the story they're in. It also helps pace the story - Elizabeth's sections are tenser, more immediate - and, of course, weirder, as she moves through the world of Littles, gnomes, fairies, and goblins. T.J. is in the human world - her antagonists are teenage boys, perverts, and life's general unfairness. The style of the sections fit well with the characters, too: Elizabeth's the Grrl - spiky and independent and full of desires; T.J. reacts more - she's only just becoming sure of who she is and what she wants, and that she deserves to want anything in the first place.

So my point? Well, at the end of the first E section (Don't Call Me Tetty) is a four-page third-person narrative present section from the Ratcatcher's pov. It has a line break and no indent to its first paragraph, but so do all the internal divisions in the various sections. The only clue you have that you're no longer in Elizabeth's pov is the opening

Hedley waits until the Littles have rounded the corner...

It's a bit jarring. I actually wondered how Elizabeth knows this.

I'm not saying the section shouldn't be there. It has to be there. We have to know about the Rat King and how he's searching for T.J., else the events later in the book are far too coincidental. And Elizabeth doesn't know about it.

It's just that it doesn't belong in her section, her first-person narrative. It jars. It breaks the flow of the narrative and jerks the reader out of the story.

Were I de Lint (oh, delusions of grandeur! dreams of, more like), I'd have pivoted the book around a short four-page section with its own chapter heading.

* not quite the same thing as regular present tense. Conjunctions like 'then' are used, for instance. Maybe I'll post on this some time.