Here we are on Day 4 of Old Favorites Week, and today I give you a book that I cried over. Not while reading the book, actually — when, in 2003, I went on vacation with my parents, we accidentally left a car window cracked overnight. My bag of books was right below that window, and my original copy of Memory and Dream was ruined. I’d rescued that copy from a bargain books place some years earlier. The story ended happily, though — we went to a bookstore in my hometown just after getting back from that vacation, and there was a fresh, new(ish) copy for me. (It was out of print at the time.)

Anyway, this is my favorite of de Lint’s works. It’s one of the earliest full novels set in his Newford, and it stars Isabelle, a painter of Jilly and Sophie’s crew. It starts in the present, when Isabelle receives a letter that the post office lost for a few years — a letter, bordering on a suicide note, from her best friend in college, Kathy. Isabelle’s memory tells her, though, that Kathy died of cancer in the hospital. Suddenly, Isabelle starts remembering all sorts of things from her past — like how the fantastic subjects of her paintings came alive, and the craziness she suffered at the hands of her old art teacher . . . What is real?

De Lint is always praised for the accuracy and believability of his female characters, and those in this book are no exception. Stereotyping a moment, but if his name had not been on the cover of the book, I probably wouldn’t have guessed it was written by a man. Even his men run towards the artistic and sensitive. He also tends to write about artists; Isabelle is a painter, as I already mentioned, but Kathy is a writer, and Alan is a small-press owner. Descriptions of painting, the artist mentality, and artwork in general are treated very realistically.

Isabelle is really two different characters; in the 1970s portions of the book, she is called ‘Izzy.’ Izzy is perhaps my favorite of the two Isabelles; she’s a student, a bohemian, and she paints realistically. She’s outgoing and has a lot of crazy friends; for a younger reader, she’s easier to identify with. The older Isabelle, who uses her full name, paints abstract works, and lives almost alone on an island in a big farmhouse. She’s blocked out a lot of memories and isn’t quite as likable. She might appeal a little more to an older reader, or at least be easier with whom to identify. Obviously, being a younger reader myself, I still identify with college- and just-post-college-age Izzy. We’ll see how that changes in the next twenty years.

A strong idea running through the book is the relationship between artists and their works. Are they responsible for what happens to their works? Are they responsible for how their works are used after they sell them? I actually wrote an essay on this topic, specifically referring to this book, for my college applications. (No, I did not go into the visual arts.) For me, the book raised a lot of discussion points: how long do we get to control what we make? What if someone completely misinterprets it? What if it takes on a life of its own? What if the one thing you produce that people love the most is what you hate the most? Well, there’s not that much you can do about it, is there?

There are other themes that run through the book, such as the dichotomy between memories and dreams, and the idea of a soul, and who has one. All these ideas are woven together in a plot that switches between different time periods and different points of view, and has excitement, danger, magic, intrigue, romance, and everything else one wants. It’s still my favorite of his works; I could see how it isn’t perhaps his most accessible work, but it still has Jilly Coppercorn. Someplace to be Flying and Trader have more accessible plots (the fantastic devices are more obvious) and probably less philosophy, but I retain a soft spot for this book since it was the first de Lint novel I ever read. 5/5 stars.