Malin’s #CBR4 Review #90: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

September is twelve, and lives in Omaha. Her father went away to war, and her mother works in a factory. One evening, when she is doing the dishes, the Green Wind shows up at her kitchen window on a flying leopard and invites her to come along on adventures to Fairyland. But while Fairyland is a delightful and magical place (naturally), all is not fun and games. The former queen, Mallow, has been replaced by the capricious Marquess, a girl not much older than September.

While on a mission to try to retrieve a very special spoon from the Marquess for some nice witches who assisted her along the way, September is sent on a quest to the woods of Autumn. If she doesn’t fetch a very precious artifact for the Marquess and return in a week, the Marquess will hurt not only September’s new friends and companions, the Wyverary (a wyvern whose father was a library) and the boy Saturday, but generally make the inhabitants of Fairyland suffer.

So September has no choice but to go off questing. During her adventures in Fairyland, she meets a whole host of interesting creatures (like the aforementioned witches, gnomes, a soap golem and more), she sacrifices her shadow to save a child, she faces her Death, very valiantly tries to avoid eating Fairy food, and learns all manner of important and significant lessons. Will she manage to find Queen Mallow’s sword before The Marquess’ time limit runs out? What will happen to her and her friends if she fails?

Clearly inspired by Victorian children’s stories like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan, this book is a wonderful story, which never talks down to kids, and makes me wish I had children of my own to read it to. Having read Valente’s Deathless before this, I knew that she had a wonderful way with words, but the brilliant way she constructs the story in The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (surely the longest children’s book title out there) took my breath away.

September is a great protagonist, impulsive and headstrong like 12-year-olds should be, and described as quite heartless (as children’s hearts grow as they age) but also brave and loyal and affectionate. She’s intelligent and knows quite a bit about how things must happen in stories, having read many of them herself. Her companions are also great, and I’m very much looking forward to reading the rest of the series, the second of which was published in hardback earlier this month.

Cross posted on my blog.

narfna’s #CBR4 Review #39: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

Dudes, it’s been waaay too long since I read this book. This review is not going to be my best ever. (I am SO BEHIND in my reviews. For instance, this is my 39th review, but I am currently reading my 46th and 47th books. I’m sure this is a problem a lot of you are having as well. Please take this opportunity to whine in my comments. I will not mind.)

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (longest title EVER, so good thing it’s so adorable) came to me very highly recommended from several sources, so I was extremely excited to read it. I even bought myself a shiny hardcover copy. I’m happy to say I enjoyed it very much, although it wasn’t as great as I was hoping it would be.

TGWCFiaSoHWM (!) is about a little girl called September who is spirited away to Fairyland one day for an adventure. She traverses Fairyland with an assortment of magical creatures and beasts, including her very own Wyverary (his mother was a Wyvern, and his father a library). She also encounters a woman made of soap, a town made of cloth, a herd of wild bicycles, and a race of half-people that I’m frankly at a loss to explain. Sure there’s an “evil queen” figure propelling her into all sorts of scrapes, and little whiffs of destiny here and there, but ultimately, it’s September herself who charts her own course around Fairyland and comes out the other side.

TGWCFiaSoHWM is charming and whimsical, and extremely imaginative, but for most of the book, it is a little light on character development. Valente packs so much imagination into her world-building that it’s breathtaking, and her sentences are frankly magical, but she spends far less time on the creations that populate this fantastical universe she’s created. For that reason, until the end of the book, reading TGWCFiaSoHWM felt like a bit of a shallow experience. All frosting, no cake. And other such metaphors.

And then the ending happened.

Until I read the ending, I was all set and ready to give the book three stars. And then the ending kind of knocked me on my ass. I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say that all the emotion and character depth that was missing throughout most of the book was packed into its last hurrah. The story of The Marquess was devastatingly sad and horrible in the best way possible. It made me rethink the whole rest of the book. I actually think this book would have been much oomphier with The Marquess as the main character, or with her story as a framing device or something. Something to let you know that September isn’t the real show here, that her journey into Fairyland signifies something more important when seen through the lens of The Marquess’s story at the end of the book.

But then again, this isn’t my story, it’s Valente’s, and her heroine is September. Anyway, the ending was awesome even though I think she could have worked it into the rest of the story somehow, so I’m giving this like 3.75 stars, but I’ll round up to 4 just because I’m feeling magnanimous.

[Cross-posted to Goodreads.]