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charameiEvery year, from June until September, it's time to feed the Muse. This isn't a choice: it's been part of my natural creative cycle since I was at least 17. Creativity slumps, productivity slumps, and everything old and familiar is boring. Not coincidentally, this is the time of year when I spend the most money on all forms of media, when I watch the most TV, and when I read the most fanfic. There's an itch in my spine for new stories.
Which goes some way to explaining how it is that I bought this book blind, and devoured it in two days, and why I now have three more books waiting to go and am seriously contemplating starting one of them right this instant.
This is a fairytale, of course. Valente draws less on the traditional fairytales such as Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and far more on Alice in Wonderland, Narnia and especially Oz: Baum aficionados will spot Bunbury having a cameo, to say nothing of more mainstream elements. Her Fairyland is at once wonderfully bizarre and delightfully logical: on the one hand, a major part of the plot is encroaching red tape*, and on the other, Valente explores some of the logical consequences of things like having a twelve-year-old girl as your ruler or growing up in Fairyland, then being kicked unceremoniously back out to the real world and suddenly being a child again.
The protagonist, September, is bold, sensible, handy with a wrench, and gets a lot of points for paying attention when people tell her that things are dangerous. She doesn't always get it right, but she does at least try very hard.
Valente's prose is minimalist but evocative: less evocative at the very beginning, but it soon warms up. The narration has a wicked sense of humour, too. There's a tendency to break the fourth wall and talk directly to the reader, something which I always find deeply annoying, but even that fitted fairly well here.
And, of course, a built-in return clause. Not that this needs a sequel: it stands perfectly well by itself.
*'Why can't the Key just fly the other way around to catch up with her soone- all traffic travels widdershins. Of course.'
A quick, compelling and excellent read.
Which goes some way to explaining how it is that I bought this book blind, and devoured it in two days, and why I now have three more books waiting to go and am seriously contemplating starting one of them right this instant.
This is a fairytale, of course. Valente draws less on the traditional fairytales such as Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and far more on Alice in Wonderland, Narnia and especially Oz: Baum aficionados will spot Bunbury having a cameo, to say nothing of more mainstream elements. Her Fairyland is at once wonderfully bizarre and delightfully logical: on the one hand, a major part of the plot is encroaching red tape*, and on the other, Valente explores some of the logical consequences of things like having a twelve-year-old girl as your ruler or growing up in Fairyland, then being kicked unceremoniously back out to the real world and suddenly being a child again.
The protagonist, September, is bold, sensible, handy with a wrench, and gets a lot of points for paying attention when people tell her that things are dangerous. She doesn't always get it right, but she does at least try very hard.
Valente's prose is minimalist but evocative: less evocative at the very beginning, but it soon warms up. The narration has a wicked sense of humour, too. There's a tendency to break the fourth wall and talk directly to the reader, something which I always find deeply annoying, but even that fitted fairly well here.
And, of course, a built-in return clause. Not that this needs a sequel: it stands perfectly well by itself.
*'Why can't the Key just fly the other way around to catch up with her soone- all traffic travels widdershins. Of course.'
A quick, compelling and excellent read.