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2013 Book Review #8: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Title: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Author: Catherynne M. Valente
Genre: YA whimsical fantasy
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: A girl rides the Green Wind to Fairyland to steal a Spoon and defeat a Marquess in a newly written tale with all the dream-logic of Alice in Wonderland.
Thoughts: The incredibly stylized language of this had me stumped for a bit. For the first few pages, I found it charming, but after a chapter or two, I began to find it overly twee. As the rhythms became more familiar, though, I wrapped back around to charming.
September is not quite a modern-day heroine, as she is growing up during WWII. But with her father at war and her mother busy making airplane engines, she is as self-sufficient as any modern feminist might wish. She's a girl who can fix a boiler and who, like most children, is only in the process of growing a heart.
For those who loved the not-quite-normal logic of Alice in Wonderland, Valente's Fairyland is every bit as strange and illogical and wondrous. There are witches who can tell the future through soup, fantastic foods of every description, migrating herds of velocipedes, and beleaguered alchemy grad students. Fairyland was once even more chaotic and wonderful under the benevolent reign of the much-mourned Queen Mallow, but her successor the Marquess is importing all the taxes and rules and rigidity of the grownup world September seeks to escape.
I've been trying to decide whether this is a book that I intend to read to my own child when he's old enough. There's a certain archness to the narrator that I suspect will pass right over a kid's head, but I think that's true of many children's entertainment. How else to keep parents from going mad? And there are worse characters to keep you company than a wyvern who thinks his father was a library and worse lessons to learn than that one does not necessarily have to chose against magic even if one wants to occasionally return home.
Author: Catherynne M. Valente
Genre: YA whimsical fantasy
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: A girl rides the Green Wind to Fairyland to steal a Spoon and defeat a Marquess in a newly written tale with all the dream-logic of Alice in Wonderland.
Thoughts: The incredibly stylized language of this had me stumped for a bit. For the first few pages, I found it charming, but after a chapter or two, I began to find it overly twee. As the rhythms became more familiar, though, I wrapped back around to charming.
September is not quite a modern-day heroine, as she is growing up during WWII. But with her father at war and her mother busy making airplane engines, she is as self-sufficient as any modern feminist might wish. She's a girl who can fix a boiler and who, like most children, is only in the process of growing a heart.
For those who loved the not-quite-normal logic of Alice in Wonderland, Valente's Fairyland is every bit as strange and illogical and wondrous. There are witches who can tell the future through soup, fantastic foods of every description, migrating herds of velocipedes, and beleaguered alchemy grad students. Fairyland was once even more chaotic and wonderful under the benevolent reign of the much-mourned Queen Mallow, but her successor the Marquess is importing all the taxes and rules and rigidity of the grownup world September seeks to escape.
I've been trying to decide whether this is a book that I intend to read to my own child when he's old enough. There's a certain archness to the narrator that I suspect will pass right over a kid's head, but I think that's true of many children's entertainment. How else to keep parents from going mad? And there are worse characters to keep you company than a wyvern who thinks his father was a library and worse lessons to learn than that one does not necessarily have to chose against magic even if one wants to occasionally return home.