The book, currently published as Jack of Kinrowan, was originally two books, published a few years apart: Jack, the Giant Killer and Drink Down the Moon. Both feature the character, Jackie Rowan, and take place in Ottawa, a city that de Lint would have us believe has dimensions that most people wouldn’t fathom.

Ottawa, at the time, was undergoing the transformation that many cities were in the 1980s. After the urban flight of the 60s and 70s, it had become a mash-up of the historical – represented by Tamson House, a sprawling manor that takes up a full city block and exists in de Lint’s Ottawa but not the “real” Ottawa – and shiny modern skyscrapers of glass and steel, populated by coke-snorting financial managers. In between, one could find tiny used bookstores and pubs where neighborhood bands played Celtic music. And, when you looked in the shadows, hints of another world: a world populated by fairy tale creatures that European immigrants had brought from the old world to the new.

This is the world that Jackie stumbles into, in Jack, the Giant Killer, following a bad breakup that reveals a hole within her that, now recognized, demands to be filled. Wandering into a huge city park along the river in an attempt to clear her head after a night of wild drinking, she finds herself the only witness to a motorcycle gang attack on a what she initially takes to be a 12-year old boy and later realizes is an older man. Forcing her courage to the sticking point, she attempts to intercede but is too late to do anything except scoop up the man’s cap and, when she turns back, all other evidence has vanished: the bikers, the man’s body – only the cap is left. When she puts the cap on, she suddenly sees another dimension to the world she knew.

And it sees her.

Accompanied by her friend, Kate, Jackie finds herself on a quest to rescue from a Giants’ Keep a magic horn which commands the biker gang known as The Hunt. Using nothing but their wits, their spirit, and a few small charms and tricks that their new friends have shared with them, Jackie and Kate set off to do the impossible, little realizing that, even if they succeed, they have started down a path from which they can’t return.

The second book, Drink Down the Moon, introduces an additional character, Johnny Faw, a gypsy fiddler, whose grandfather was the Fiddle Wit for the faerie of Ottawa, playing a tune that allowed propelled them into a moonlit rade that recharged their energy. They particularly need this energy now, as they are being picked off, hunted down one by one by a wizard with no heart and a pack of shadow hounds. Jackie and Kate, as champions of the little folk, feel obligated to take on the wizard, though they aren’t much better prepared than they had been in their first adventure.

The problem I am having lately is that, as I reach deeper into my collection, I keep finding books that I want to read again. At the same time, I have continued to find new books that I want to read. And a few hours at bedtime and on weekends is not going to catch me up, even as quickly as I read. I’m going to need a long plane trip, or a cruise, to focus on the new stuff, and maybe a bad cold or something so I can cuddle up with the old stuff.

This is another book that I often give to nieces as they grow older. I don’t know if my nieces appreciate the books that I give – I get the feeling that their generation is pretty hard-headed, lacking the romantic leanings that drew me into fantasy when I was their age. I needed to believe that I, like Jackie and Kate, could stumble into something bigger than I was, a world where I could defeat evil with nothing but my wits and maybe a magic book. Someplace different than my grey-carpeted office, where I sat at a desk all day translating policy manuals into English and laboring to persuade self-appointed experts that there was a different way to accomplish their goals, a way that required them to see things from the perspective of the people they needed to influence. Magic of a sort, I suppose, but not the kind that appealed to my heroic yearnings.

That is what, I think, drew me into de Lint’s books: they started with ordinary people in a world I recognized, feeling a hole within them, stumbling through daily routines that didn’t satisfy them. And then something happened, a veil was pulled back, revealing another world, a magical world that needed them to step in and take action. It wasn’t safe or pretty. In other books, the monsters of the faerie world are joined by monsters from our own, coke-snorting rapists and mafia goons. Sometimes good guys are lost in the fight. Yet somehow the champions always prevail.

If you’re feeling lost in the mundane world, yearning for another dimension, a heroic opportunity, try Jack of Kinrowan.