Novel: The Onion Girl

Overview
Set in the myth-haunted city of Newford, The Onion Girl traces a woman's slow, sometimes painful journey from fragmentation toward wholeness. The urban landscape hums with folkloric energy, and the boundary between waking life and the dreamlike memory-lands is porous. The narrative treats the self as layered and discoverable, a place where personal history, communal stories, and the supernatural intersect.
The voice is intimate and compassionate, balancing the grit of everyday urban life with moments of lyricism and enchantment. The novel moves at a careful pace, allowing emotional wounds to surface and be addressed through encounters that are as psychological as they are magical.

Plot
A woman who has carried a history of childhood abuse and long-standing isolation finds her life unsettled by events that draw her back into memory. When a new crisis in the city forces her to confront what she has long tried to bury, she crosses into the city's other realms, memory-lands where past and present overlap and where personal histories take on tangible shape. These journeys are not mere escapes but necessary passages that reveal neglected truths and fractured pieces of identity.
Within these liminal realms she meets guides and spirits who help her map the layers of herself, each encounter peeling back another skin of pain, shame, or denial. The novel structures the protagonist's recovery as a process of reassembling a life, acknowledging the past, learning to trust again, and reengaging with a community that is both human and mythic. Rather than offering instant catharsis, the story emphasizes steady, hard-won healing and the work of making amends with one's own inner child.

Setting and Mood
Newford is presented as a living, breathing character: a city of alleys, music, old storefronts and hidden doorways where folklore continues to shape experience. Ordinary places teeter on the edge of the uncanny; a park bench or a riverbank can become a doorway into a memory-land. The setting allows modern urban struggles to be reflected through mythic lenses, making the familiar strange and the strange deeply familiar.
The mood shifts between melancholy and gentle wonder. Scenes of domestic detail and urban routine alternately temper and highlight the novel's more mystical moments. The overall tone is healing rather than sensational, privileging resonance over spectacle.

Characters and Community
The protagonist's gradual return to trust is mirrored by the community around her, neighbors, friends, and long-standing Newford figures who blend human empathy with folkloric roles. These supporting presences are not sidelined; they participate in the healing process, offering memory, testimony, and ritual that help to reweave what was torn. The network of relationships emphasizes interdependence and the idea that recovery is rarely a solitary achievement.
Mythic or spiritual figures in the story function as interlocutors between inner life and outer reality. They do not simply fix problems with magic but illuminate forgotten pathways and encourage the protagonist to reclaim agency over her own narrative.

Themes and Significance
Central themes are trauma, memory, identity and the labor of healing. The "onion" metaphor underpins the novel's understanding of the self: layers must be recognized and sometimes peeled away to find what lies at the core. Forgiveness, boundaries, and the reclamation of voice emerge as vital parts of recovery, and the book insists that healing is as much about community and storytelling as it is about individual insight.
Charles de Lint's blend of urban fantasy and folklore offers a humane exploration of pain and repair. Rather than resolving trauma in tidy ways, the novel honors complexity, showing how mythic imagination can become a pragmatic resource for rebuilding a life. The result is an affecting, quietly powerful story about how people learn to live again with the echoes of their past.