Charles de Lint’s Crow Girls: Character Connection

We all have characters we love. Let’s spotlight these fantastic creations! Whether you want to be friends with them or you have a full-blown crush on them, you know you love them and want everyone else to love them too!

Most of you will probably post about how much you love each character, but this is a great place for the more creative ones among you to let go and have fun! Write a love letter to Captain Wentworth. Write yourself into a scene with Anne and Diana. Draw a picture of yourself in Jamie’s arms. The possibilities are endless.

Be sure to post the book’s title and author, and be very careful not to give away spoilers while talking about how much you love your characters.

Mr. Linky will be posted here on The Introverted Reader every Thursday.

Reading Muse and Reverie by Charles de Lint this week has gotten me in the mood to feature his characters. My very first Character Connection post was about one of his characters too. This guy has created a whole city of people that I love, so you can expect to see his books show up here fairly often.

Anyway, this week’s Character Connection is…………

The crow girls, Maida and Zia, feature in de Lint’s Newford books and are hard to describe. I picture them as older teen versions of Emily the Strange, graphic novels written by Rob Reger that I haven’t read. Yet.

Charles de Lint’s wife, Mary Ann Harris, illustrated a short story about them, so you can see her rendering on de Lint’s site.

Mostly the crow girls, who look like identical twins but swear they aren’t even sisters, are charming, funny, and lovable.  They have a crazy sweet tooth.  Here’s a pretty typical exchange between the two, from the story, “A Crow Girls’ Christmas.”

     Maida nodded.  “You just get to wheel around and around in your chair and not worry about all the very serious things that we do.”
     “Such as?”  Jilly asked.
     Zia shrugged.  “Why don’t pigs fly?”
     “Or why is white a colour?”  Maida offered.
     “Or black.”
     “Or yellow ochre.”

……

      “Could it be more puzzling?”  Zia asked.
     Maida simply smiled and held out her tea cup.  “May I have a refill please?”
     Jilly pushed the sugar bag over to her.  Maida filled her tea cup to the brim with sugar.  After a glance at Zia, she filled Zia’s tea cup as well.

The very first time I remember reading about the crow girls, they were in an entirely different mode.  This is from my favorite of de Lint’s books, Someplace to be Flying.

He knew a momentary sense of relief–someone else was playing Good Samaritan tonight–except there was only a girl standing there on the roof of the cab.  A kid.  Skinny and monochrome and not much to her:  raggedy blue-black hair, dark complexion, black clothes, and combat boots.  There seemed to be a cape fluttering up behind her like a sudden spread of black wings, there one moment, gone the next, and then she really was just a kid, standing there, her weight on one leg, a switchblade held casually in a dark hand.

….

     Hank blinked, thinking the girl had somehow transported herself magically from the top of the cab to the pavement behind the killer.  But the first girl was still standing on the roof of the cab.  She jumped to the ground, landing lightly on the balls of her feet.  Seeing them together, he realized they were twins.

     The second girl knelt down and cleaned her knife on the dead man’s pants, leaving a dark stain on the dove-gray material.  Closing the blade, she made it disappear up her sleeve and walked away to where the woman Hank had been trying to rescue lay in the glare of the cab’s headlights.

….

     “Spit’s just as magic as blood,” she said.  “Didn’t you ever know that?”

     He shook his head.  “You look so funny,” she went on.  “The way you’re staring at me.”

     Before he could move, she leaned forward and kissed him, a small tongue darting out to flick against his lips, then she jumped to her feet, leaving behind a faint musky smell.

     “You taste good,”  she said.  “You don’t have any real meanness in you.”  She looked solemn now.  “But you know all about meanness, don’t you?”

In de Lint’s Newford mythology, Raven created the world by stirring up his pot.  And The Crow Girls were there to watch it happen. A character in the story, “Da Slockit Light” says this about them:

They’re the oldest and most powerful of all, but it’s not something they remember….I think it’s got something to do with how remembering something like…well, I think it would be too much for anyone to hold on to and still stay sane.

 ….

There’s a story…that if the crow girls ever fully wake and remember who they are, they will return the world to the state it was in before Raven made it.

So, are these crow girls The Crow Girls?  You decide.

Who did you connect with this week? Link your post in Mr. Linky! Please leave a comment letting me know that you stopped by if you link up on a day other than Thursday. I don’t want to miss anyone’s post!

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