Jack in the Green is an original novella, set in the fictional Southwestern desert city of Santo del Vado Viejo.
Best friends Maria and Luz grew up in the barrio and were inseparable until Luz left town to fight against social injustice. They lose track of one another until one day, while at her job cleaning rich people's homes, Maria spots Luz among a gang robbing the house next door. Luz later tells Maria that her gang robs from the rich and gives to the poor, like a modern day Robin Hood. Luz says she brought the leader and his men to their city by magic.
Maria isn't sure if she believes that, but she does know that she feels an undeniable romantic connection to their handsome leader, the mysterious Jack Green, and the feeling is mutual. Between her rekindled friendship with Luz and her attraction to Jack, she gets drawn into a life that's 180 degrees opposite to how she's been living. But when things go awry, it's Maria who must pay the final price.
Reviews:
"Charles de Lint was writing Urban Fantasy before that genre was infiltrated by vampires and gritty streets. His Urban Fantasy introduces a magical realism to the world, spirit magic seeping into the cement environments mankind has built and most of the stories selected for this volume reflect that interest."—Steven H. Silver, The SF Site
De Lint is prolific, and if you've resisted picking him up because you're not sure where to start, this is an excellent way to get a feel for his polished prose, his deep empathy for his own characters, and a wondrous world that may be filled with danger but is no less beautiful because of that.—Mark Rose, BookGasm
"One of the most original fantasy writers currently working."—Booklist
"Charles de Lint is the modern master of urban fantasy. Folktale, myth, fairy
tale, dreams, urban legend—all of it adds up to pure magic in de Lint's vivid,
original world. No one does it better."—Alice Hoffman
"De Lint creates an entirely organic mythology that seems as real as the folklore
from which it draws."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Charles de Lint is an impossibly, ridiculously talented sort of man—and I've
been reading him for so long that he pretty much crafted my own ideas of what
a fairy tale ought to be."—Cherie Priest
"Charles de Lint is a folksinger as well as a writer and it is this voice we hear...
both old and new, lyric, longing, touched by magic."—Jane Yolen
"He shows that, far from being escapism, contemporary fantasy can be the
deep mythic literature of our time."—Fantasy & Science Fiction
"You open a de Lint story, and like the interior of a very genial Pandora's box,
the atmosphere is suddenly full of deep woods and quaint city streets and a
magic that's nowhere near so far removed as Middle Earth."—James P. Blaylock
"De Lint is a romantic; he believes in the great things, faith, hope, and charity
(especially if love is included in that last), but he also believes in the power of
magic—or at least the magic of fiction—to open our eyes to a larger world."—Edmonton Journal
"It's hard not to feel encouraged to be a better person after reading a book by
Ottawa's Charles de Lint."—Halifax Chronicle Herald
