The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Too Much Treacle and Too Many Exclamation Marks! In the beginning of Catherynne M. Valente’s third Fairyland novel, The Girl Who Soared over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (2013), September’s mother teaches the girl how to drive on her 14th birthday, and soon she’s running errands around her Nebraska home in her neighbor’s old Model A Ford to earn money to bring with her to Fairyland on her next adventure there. But the usual season to visit Fairyland comes and goes, and she’s starting to fear that she’s become too practical and adult to go again, when one day while out in the car to repair a fence, she meets a Lineman tasked with maintaining the line separating Fairyland from our world (September’s adventures in the first two novels in the series have created trouble spots along the line). Suddenly the Blue Wind, accompanied by flying puffins clad in Spanish armor, floats by, scorns September, and vanishes with the Model A through a hole in the Lineman’s net, so the girl jumps after her. September lands in the hinterlands of Westerly, the city of the Six Winds. There she becomes a “Royal scofflaw, professional revolutionary, and criminal of the realm,” dons a black silk outfit, retrieves her car, and buys a “Way,” which has her setting off to deliver a mysterious box to Almanack (a giant whelk) on the moon of Fairyland. After about seven long chapters, September reaches Fairyland’s moon, where she spends the rest of the picaresque novel visiting a series of mostly forgettable outre characters with mostly difficult to remember names, including the Calcatrix, a crocodile exchequer; Ballast Downbound, a Klabautermann; Nefarious Freedom Coppermolt III, a lobster; Spoke, a taxicrab; Pentameter and Valentine, a pair of a Stationary Circus acrobats; Marigold and Tamarind, a pair of Lamia Lunaticks; and Turing, a tiger Tyguerrotype. The otherwise varied supporting characters do a lot of equally hyper sounding talking, their utterances punctuated with exclamation marks, like this: “‘Where I come from, being a Princess is a job, young primate!’ huffed Marigold. ‘A position in the civil service! We are Executive Branch, child! Why, I never wore a dress except on a dare! I wore a suit, like any government employee. And a fine suit, too, with a hat to match! I had more ties than a railroad!’” (She goes on for a few pages like that.) Sometimes the talking furthers the plot, which comes to concern September’s quest to stop the giant Yeti Ciderskin from carrying out his revenge on the moon and Fairyland below it. (Long ago the Yeti lost his paw to a fairy trap, because, as Yetis move so fast you can’t see them--except in blurry photos--the fairies wanted his paw to manipulate time, so Ciderskin is apparently causing moonquakes to shake everyone off the moon and perhaps to make the moon fragment and rain down rocks onto Fairyland below.) But often the talking does not seem vital to the story, as when Candlestick the Buraq (mule) in charge of fates goes off on a page-long rant on the relative religious merits and demerits of Teatimers vs. Midnight Snackers. Partly as a result of all the talking (often more disquisition than conversation), this third book is less enjoyable and more labor-intensive than the wonderful first two novels in the series, the first fantastically introducing September to Fairyland, the second interestingly exploring the concept of shadows. The third one’s title has September soaring over the moon of Fairyland, but reading it felt more like struggling through treacle. There are plenty of neat concepts in the novel, like money and magic being the same because people give them value by believing in them, the members of the Stationary Circus feasting on paper, ink, and printing type, three-dimensional flesh and blood people meeting two-dimensional versions of themselves in the Country of Photograph, and of course “Tools have rights.” Yet there is also at times too much of a muchness with Valente’s fertile imagination, as if it, like many of her characters, is hyper. For example, time is spent now and then on September’s criminal title and outfit, only for her to end up never doing anything criminal in the story, her Model A car gains a name (Aroostook) and steadily changes into something organic and alive as the adventure continues, but never becomes an appealing character, and Abecedaria the Librarian of the Lopsided Library is not only a Catalogue Imp, which sounds just right for her job and name, but also a Periwig from the Foxtail Haberdashery, which sounds excrescent. Luckily, September is accompanied on her quest by her charming best friends Ell the Wyverary (a wyvern who is sure his father was a library) and Saturday (a Marid, a sea genii), and it is great to spend time with them again. Ell is working in the lunar library, troubled by a curse that makes him shrink each time he breathes fire. Saturday has found his niche as a trapeze artist in the Stationary Circus but suffers from September’s inability to appreciate the effects of Marids like him living backwards and forwards in time. Moreover, he and she are both older now, so there’s the awkward teenage love thing. September’s prolonged identity crisis, not knowing what she wants to be or what to call herself, is fine (this is a YA fantasy novel after all), and the climax and the resolution are splendid, providing a perfect surprise that is strangely moving and perfectly fitting, casting in a new light the monstrous Yeti, a special Stethoscope, and the usual end for a mortal child visiting Fairyland. But finally this book was more labor and less pleasure than the first two, and if my graduate student were not writing her thesis about the series, I might not muster the gumption to read its fourth and fifth books. View all my reviews
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Uprooted by Naomi Novik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sensual, Romantic, and Contrived Magic Seventeen-year-old Agnieszka knows like everyone else in her village that the local wizard called the Dragon is going to take her best friend Kasia to live in his Tower for ten years. During that period she’ll never be seen by anyone outside, will learn mysterious things, and will presumably sleep with the wizard, after which period she’ll finally exit the Tower only to leave their valley forever. The Dragon has been doing this kind of thing every ten years for well over 100 years and always chooses a 17-year-old-girl with some kind of gift, for beauty or kindness for example, which is why Kasia, who is extremely beautiful and kind, is expected to become his victim. Of course, we are not completely surprised when the Dragon ends up choosing Agnieszka instead, because after all she is the first-person narrator, and her only gift seems to be the ability to stain and tear or otherwise damage her clothes. Naomi Novik’s Uprooted (2015) then depicts Agnieszka’s difficult instruction in magic, difficult because she can’t seem to manage the simplest cantrips because the Dragon teaches her an elegant, beautiful, systemized kind of magic at odds with her nature. We quickly learn that she is uniquely gifted but in a different more intuitive and spontaneous way. The stakes are high, because Agnieszka’s valley and kingdom (Polnya), along with that of their neighbor Rosya, are under threat from the malevolent magical Wood, which is constantly seeking to extend itself, presumably bent on turning the world into a foul forest. Thus it is given to sending demonic Wolves to corrupt people so they will murder their families or Walkers (like malignant Ents) to steal people into the Wood so they may feed its Heart Trees, and so on. Novik’s novel is an absorbing read because Agnieszka is an appealing protagonist, and it’s interesting to read about her learning about magic, her abilities, the Dragon, and the Wood, and to watch as she finds herself experiencing new things, ranging from the horrifying to the mystifying and from the brutal to the sensual. And supporting characters like the Dragon, Kasia, and the Wood are compelling, too. It is a novel by turns suspenseful, beautiful, horrifying, humorous, moving, and romantic. It does fall prey to the old author-can-do-anything-she-wants-with-magic plot contrivance temptation of much fantasy, for at key points Novik tends to make Agnieszka find or not find a useful spell or run out of or not run out of magical energy in ways that do not seem altogether consistent or convincing. But Novik does also interestingly tweak typical modern fairy tale fantasy tropes like heroic prince, amoral wizard, and malignant wood. She also does plenty of fine sensual and vivid writing, as when she describes the first time Agnieszka reads a book of magic aloud: “The words sang like birds out of my mouth, beautiful, melting like sugared fruit.” Or as when she does some magic: “My strength welled up through my body and fountained out of my mouth, and where it left me, a trembling in the air began and went curling down around my body in a spiraling path.” Her novel explores interesting themes like the costs of immortality associated with magic, for as one centuries-old witch with countless great-grand-children says, “Once you’re old enough, they [lovers] are like flowers,” so “You learn to love other things than people.” Agnieszka doesn’t want to accept that, but does she have a choice? And I am thankful that Novik’s novel may be read by itself rather than as the first in an interminable series. In that and in her fine writing and compact cast of appealing characters and themes about life and love and creativity and power, her novel reminds me of Patricia McKillip’s work. Fans of such fantasy (who like hot romantic lines like “I wanted to rub handprints through his dust”) should enjoy this book. But be ready for audiobook reader Julia Emelin’s thick Slavic (Polish? Russian?) accent! A few hours into the book I came to like it and the exotic eastern European flavor she imbues the story with, and she does a splendidly scary Wood voice when speaking from inside possessed people. The problem is that she also maintains throughout the novel a rather monotonous, stilted delivery, with odd pauses in mid-sentence that often made me think a sentence had abruptly ended only to have it start up again. So you’d best listen carefully to the sample before buying the audiobook and compare it to a sample of the newer version of the book read by Katy Sobey in a crisp British accent with more natural rhythm. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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