I thought that the rhetoric of the book positively demanded tragedy. There's so much emphasis on how the dead character wrote stories that Didn't Always Have Happy Endings. And the ending of this book was all sweetness and light.

Now, de Lint didn't cheat. The one rabbit he pulled out of a hat, the painting over a painting trick, he set up fair and square. But nothing is lost, not even the dead woman, who gets to go off with a ghost of Izzy. Too cutsy.

Mm, also, when I was reading it, I thought Jillian was coded as sinister. She's not; she's one of de Lint's favorite characters, and she's a bit of a problem for me in that she delivers whatever moral de Lint holds at the moment, never mind whether it's consistent with anything else. I don't think she's in Someplace to Be Flying, which is one of my favorite of de Lint's.