The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Finding Fairyland Fun Again Or “If you have ever seen a falling star, you have seen a Changeling arriving” Catherynne M. Valente’s fourth Fairyland novel, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (2015), begins with the Red Wind and her flying panther spiriting away from Fairyland a reluctant troll boy called Hawthorn (he’s been happy at home with his magical parents and huge pet toad), and sending him to Chicago, where he becomes a Changeling called Thomas, replacing the human infant son of the Roods. The neat thing about this novel in the context of the series is that while the first three books feature September, a girl from Nebraska, visiting Fairyland, this one depicts Hawthorn, a “boy” from Fairyland, visiting our world. The common element is the child protagonist as stranger in a strange land, and one of the many sources of pleasure in reading this novel lies in Valente’s imaginative depiction of Hawthorn’s Fairyland perception of real-world things like apartments, pancakes, and “the Kingdom of School,” wherein “A Teacher is the same thing as an Empress only a Teacher wears skirts and uses a ruler instead of a scepter,” and “There is a curse called Homework a Teacher may cast if she longs for her power to continue after the great bell has rung,” and “a peculiar breed of demon-wights called Report Cards” guard the Kingdom. There’s a wonderful, painful chapter depicting Hawthorn/Thomas’ inability to assimilate to life in Chicago, because his experience as a troll in Fairyland when he could talk with stones and everything was alive makes him constantly tear apart his toys and other things in the Rood home in his frustrated efforts to get them to respond. On top of that, he’s always uttering fanciful “nonsense” about things like the King of Pancakes or calling his human mother a witch because she can do things like flick a switch to light up the house and make blue fire roar out of the stove top, after which she says, “Magic.” Thus, his father is always saying the boy is not Normal, despite the Changeling trying to be as Normal as possible by writing down the “laws” of our world in a notebook called Inspector Balloon (he hopefully names everything because without a name a thing can’t exist and can’t talk to you). The friendship between Hawthorn/Thomas and a fellow Changeling he meets at school, a wooden fetch girl called Tamburlaine, is funny, unpredictable, and moving. The novel soon has the pair and their animated object companions, a feisty scrap-yarn wombat toy called Blunderbuss (who says she’s a “combat wombat” from the Land of Wom) and a gramophone called Scratch (who communicates by playing scene-appropriate records) returning to Fairyland. There they are seized by the mobile Capital city, Pandemonium, where the current monarch, Charlie Crunchcrab, sets them on a quest to get him out of being King without having to die first (for “Fairy countries mate for life”). They’re advised to find the mysterious and disreputable Spinster, who may be able to help. They meet human Changelings, learn about their exploitation, and more, as Valente reverses the direction of the novel’s defamiliarizing culture shock from aliens visiting our world to aliens returning home. The way she works it all out is interesting and neat. Whereas I found the third Fairyland book, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (2013), turgid and hyperventilating (filled with characters reciting lengthy exclamation mark punctuated monologues), this book is a pleasure from start to finish. Despite being shorter than the previous volumes in the series, it has just as many delightful and imaginative fantasy elements and rich and playful lines. Like these: Fun Fantasy Riffs “All trolls are skilled in the Dark Arts of Penmanship, owing to the heroics of Tufa, one of the three Primeval Trolls. Tufa, shortly after solving the mystery of walking upright and making friends with bridges, hunted down a wild Alphabet and made it her pet. Alphabets are one of the longest-lived creatures in all the grand universe. The Troll Alphabet lives still in the Heliotrope Hills, grumbling to itself, devouring passing slang, and blessing, in the small ways an Alphabet can, the folk that tamed it when the world was young.” Imaginative and Vivid Descriptions “His troll-self stretched and reached up from his belly, popping its aching joints, pushing aside all the bits of him which were not-troll, straining toward the pencil with jaws open. The troll was ready. Finally, it was his turn. The troll in Thomas seized the end of the pencil in his own sharp teeth and chewed it into a fine point, delirious with the happiness of having something to do. It felt like biting into a quarter and spitting out pennies.” The familiar made new “Any city looks a bit like its mother and father.” Witty, Playful, Self-Aware Narrator “Do you remember being born? Only a few can say they do and not be caught immediately in the lie, and most of them are wizards. I, of course, remember it perfectly. Certain benefits are granted to narrators as part of the hiring package, to compensate for our irregular hours and unsafe working conditions. As clear as waking, I remember your hands on the cover of the book, your bright eyes moving swiftly over the pages, the light of your reading lamp, your small laughs and occasional puzzlements.” Wisdom for YA Readers “Everybody’s strange everywhere. Most of the trick of being a social animal is pretending you’re not. But who do you fool? Nobody worth talking to.” I have only a small criticism and a medium one: Valente can misuse lie/lay, as in “Equator is a great fat serpent who lays around the whole world,” and the book doesn’t really end but serves as a prelude to the fifth and final novel in the series, as, the third, fourth, and fifth books make one story arc. Luckily, this book revived my desire to finish the Fairyland series. Readers who like fantasy with original imagination, playful narrators, and rich language should enjoy Valente’s series, but should start with the first one, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (2011). View all my reviews
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