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RYO Review: Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente
I read the first few chapters of this novella as an act of faith, because Valente has earned my trust as a reader, and because Silently and Very Fast has an award and nomination list long enough to be its own short story (it won the Locus Award for Best Novella, and was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards). So I waded through dense cyber-fairytale imagery on the assumption that it would resolve itself into a story. It did. A very, very good one.
It’s difficult to find the beginning of Silently and Very Fast; it’s one of those Ouroboros stories which loops and curls until it’s eating its own tail. At some point, it becomes clear that your narrator is Elefsis, a self-aware program that lives in the consciousness of the Uoya-Agostino family in a future version of Hokkaido. Elefsis is passed down through the generations in a surgically-implanted jewel, and each human mind she lives in teaches her more about emotion, humanity, creation, and symbolic representation. When the book begins, Elefsis has just been hastily transferred to a woman named Neva — the last surviving member of the family. Neva is tense and unhappy to be saddled with the family heirloom, and she keeps secrets tucked away in their shared dreamscape. Elefsis mines their internal consciousness (the Interior), and discovers more about the world outside them and her place in it.
WoGF Review: Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente
Megan AM (couchtomoon) first discovered she was a SF nerd when a group of nerd boys sat near her friends in the school cafeteria and she overheard them talking about her favorite books and movies. Her friends noticed, too. Nowadays, when she is not managing crises at work, or hanging out with her gorgeous husband, you can find her curled up on the couch reading SF novels. She posts her reviews of these novels on her blog From couch to moon.
Lewis Carroll meets Anne Rice (the erotica years) in this surreal urban fantasy about four individuals who travel to the city of Palimpsest via a sex portal. Yes, you read that correctly: In order to visit the city, instead of going down the rabbit hole, you need to go down someone else’s hole.
Sorry.
Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente is an adult fairy tale in every sense, and not for the pearl-clutchers who may accidentally pick up this book expecting a story about medieval manuscripts. But, that’s not to say that this is a one-handed read either. Fans of the recent boon in erotic fiction probably won’t be satisfied, either. The sex happens in the real world, among ugly, destitute characters who view sex as an mere gateway, and sometimes obstruction, to their dream city. There may be a few titillating phrases here and there, but this is not erotica. Sometimes, the sex seems incidental, as if all the good portals have already been taken.
WoGF Review: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente
Alix Heintzman (alixheintzman) recently earned herself a graduate degree in history from the University of Vermont, and has circled back to her Old Kentucky Home with her partner Nick Stiner. She spends her time semi-desperately repairing the abandoned house they just bought, writing history high school curriculum, and reading fantasy books. She’s dipping her toes into the blogosphere at The Other Side of the Rain to sharpen her writing skills and also not-incidentally talk about the books she loves. And to spare Nick from endless discussions of plot details in books he hasn’t read.
In the Night Garden is essentially Arabian Nights, if Scheherazade had been a feminist literary critic with a working knowledge of world mythology and a wicked sense of irony. Certainly, this Scheherazade wouldn’t have ended up marrying the Sultan who put his first 1,000 wives to death.
It starts with a young girl with dark tattoos around her eyes: tiny, black letters spelling out hundreds of fairy tales. A young prince becomes obsessed with the girl’s stories, and very soon the reader and the young prince are both sitting in rapt silence in the night garden, listening. For maybe five pages, you feel you’re in comfortable, predictable territory. The tattooed girls tells of a prince who runs away from home and discovers a witch’s hut in the woods. Ah, you think, if he doesn’t watch his mouth he’ll be set three impossible tasks. Or he’ll be transformed into a pig, or a beast, or wind up living in an enchanted castle waiting for his true love to see past his ugliness and marry him. But the rules are different in the night garden. Instead, the witch woman emerges, horribly scarred, and tells the prince her story. The nesting stories continue, each one more unearthly and brilliant and unpredictable than the last.
WoGF Review: Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente
Guest Blogger and WWEnd member, Rob Weber (valashain), reviews science fiction and fantasy books on his blog Val’s Random Comments which we featured in a previous post: Five SF/F Book Blogs Worth Reading. Be sure to visit his site and let him know you found him here.
Palimpsest is my ninth read in the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge. I picked it mostly because Valente had caught my eye a few times in the last few years but I never got around to reading anything by her. I remember this novel being well received when it was published. It was nominated for the Locus Fantasy, Hugo and Mythopoeic awards and took the Lambda Literary Award home. Quite an impressive list. The novel also served as an inspiration for Valente’s crowd-funded novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (2011) and it’s sequels. In other words, more than enough reasons to have a closer look at it.
Palimpsest is a city unlike any you’ve heard of. It is a city of wonders, a mystery and a curse at the same time. Only a few people can gain access and only for a single night at a time, before being flung back into their mundane existence. Those who make the passage are marked forever but finding others to help them relive the experience isn’t easy. The city keeps pulling them in however, the lure of Palimpsest is irresistible, and for a lucky few, permanent residence in the city appears possible. If they can overcome the challenges the city sets them.
WoGF Review: Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
Sarah I. (tuulenhaiven) was one of those 7 year olds who came home from the library with a stack of books bigger than she was. Only a bit taller now, she still reads constantly, and her childhood love for dragons and space ships hasn’t waned at all. She blogs about her reading adventures and other things at www.tuulenhaiven.com.
“If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing,” Marya thought, “I shall always choose to see.”
Mmm, this book! – this is proper storytelling. Catherynne M. Valente tangles and then unwinds the threads of Russian folklore and actual history, eventually cutting a vibrant, painfully beautiful tale about love and death and marriage off of her loom.
Marya Morevna sits in a second floor window that overlooks a street that used to be known as Gorokhovaya (just as Petrograd was once called St. Petersburg) and watches a rook, and then a plover, and then a shrike fall out of a tree and turn into handsome young men. These young men marry her three older sisters, and Marya is left with a complex secret, having ‘seen the world naked, caught out‘. As she waits for her own bird to fall out of a tree and come to claim her, Marya reads Pushkin, meets the Stalinist house elves that live behind the stove, and brushes her long dark hair with a silver comb.
WoGF Review: Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente
Jonathan Thornton (thrak) is a long-time science fiction and fantasy reader, but has only just started writing reviews on his blog Golden Apples of the West. Outside of reading, his interests are music and insects. His new year’s resolution is to review more of the books he has read on WWEnd and maybe finally get round to writing his own SF novel that he’s always talking about.
“Terrible things occur when you outgrow the space allotted to you. You cannot really circumnavigate Fairyland like September did, not really. It’s too big for you.”
Palimpsest is one of those weird, monolithic tales about a different reality that impinges on our own, or, in this case, we impinge on it. The only other books remotely like it are John Crowley’s Little, Big, in which we learn, by insinuations, that the world of faerie is encroaching on our own, and Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, in which the protagonist journeys through a shifting, mythic city cut off from the rest of the world. Indeed, the quote above echoes the central mantra of Little, Big – “The further in you go, the bigger it gets”, while the lyrical and evocative closing lines of Palimpsest remind me of the iconic ending of Dhalgren; if the narrative of Palimpsest is not recursive, it does suggest that others will follow the protagonists’ journey. More than that, Catherynne Valente‘s prose achieves a level of hallucinatory vividness and poetic lyricism on a par with Delany and Crowley, although her narrative voice is most definitely her own. And like those two books, Palimpsest manages to weave together strands from mythology and folklore into something so convincing you have a hard time believing it’s not real.
WoGF Review: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
Alexandra P. (everythinginstatic) was first introduced to sci-fi by her father, at the age of 14. Although it took 3 years and 2 attempts to finish Foundation, she hasn’t stopped reading sci-fi since, branching out into fantasy and speculative fiction as well. Her biggest passions are reading, tea and photography, and she hopes that 2013 will be the year she finally revisits Hari Seldon. You can read more of her reviews on her blog Wanderlust.
What happens when you take fairytales, add in a nod to Alice in Wonderland and more than enough of the myth of Persephone, all filtered through a bright writing writing style that tips its hat to the Victorians? You get Catherynne M. Valente‘s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, a beautifully woven tale full of mystery, intrigue, a seriously well developed cast (and a female lead!), and a world that I want to get lost in over and over again. There is a brightness to the story (despite its dark moments), and this is a book that appeals both to the incredibly misleading “young adult” label, as well as actual grown ups.
September is a girl of 12, who longs for adventure, so it comes as no surprise when the Green Wind takes her away to Fairyland. From there, it’s an Alice in Wonderland meets Persephone, in a Fairyland under the control of the cruel Marquess, a place that still longs for good Queen Mallow. It’s a charming, if dangerous place, filled with wyverns and Fae and Marid, and Valente makes sure that we don’t fall for its charms quite as easily as September.
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
Guest Blogger, Allie McCarn, reviews science fiction and fantasy books on her blog Tethyan Books which we featured in a previous post: Five SF/F Book Blogs Worth Reading. She has already contributed many great book reviews to WWEnd and has generously volunteered to write some periodic reviews for our blog. Be sure to check out her site and let her know you found her here.
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
by Catherynne M. Valente
Published: Feiwel and Friends, 2011
Series: Fairyland Book 1
Awards Won: Andre Norton Award
The Book:
“Twelve-year-old September is an ordinary girl who lives what seems to her a quiet, constricting life. Her father is gone to war and her mother works, leaving September mostly to herself in their home. One day, the Green Wind arrives, offering to take her away for adventures in Fairyland.
Without a backward glance, September takes him up on his offer. However, for all its wonders, Fairyland is a tricky, dangerous place. September makes new friends as she travels, including a ‘Wyverary’ named A-Through-L and a Marid boy named Saturday. She also finds new enemies, such as the cruel Marquess who has taken over Fairyland after the disappearance of the good Queen Mallow.
Though her journey started as a whim, it is going to take every ounce of resourcefulness, courage, strength and compassion September can muster to see her way to the end of it!” ~Allie
Here is my very late review for the final selection of the Calico Reaction blog’s 2011 book club. This is my first foray into Valente’s work, though I’ve heard a lot of praise for her novels. The Girl Who… was originally a fictional children’s book referenced in Valente’s novel Palimpset. The novel feels complete in itself, though I can certainly see where there are many more stories to tell in this universe. So far, Valente has published a prequel (The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For a Little While), and I imagine we’re likely to see more young adult novels set in this world in the future.
My Thoughts:
The basic story of The Girl Who… is pretty familiar—a child is whisked away to a magical land that is plagued by a cruel ruler. In very general terms, it has a lot in common with other children’s classics, such as The Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Narnia, or Alice in Wonderland. It also features a technique commonly found in old children’s fiction, where the narrator constantly inserts comments and asides into the flow of the story. The novel, though, seems conscious of the nods it’s making towards previous work, and manages to keep its own spark of originality. For me, the vibrant writing, profusion of imaginative creatures and societies, and unexpectedly serious turns of the plot helped The Girl Who… to stand as a wonderful new example of this familiar kind of story.
In the beginning, the writing was playfully descriptive and more than a little silly (intentionally so—that is not an insult). The writing occasionally felt a little too self-consciously clever and whimsical, but it was not long before I was enjoying the story so much that I didn’t mind. The Girl Who… progressed with an impressive forward momentum that packed a lot of story and subtext into a pretty short novel. September was constantly moving through new situations and problems, and meeting all sorts of new supernatural creatures. These creatures included a wish-granting Marid, a ‘wyverary’ (half-wyvern, half-library), 100+-year-old sentient household objects, a golem made of soap, and many others. I loved the constantly changing setting and never-ending introductions of new beings.
While the vividly described supernatural elements gave the story a fun and exciting sense of place, it was the characters that really captured my attention. Like most tales of this kind, The Girl Who… combines a fantastical adventure with a story of maturation. In the beginning, September is described as “Somewhat Heartless”, as all children are, though she’s a well-meaning, pleasant heroine. Through her harrowing journey, September is forced to a deeper understanding of herself and the effects of her actions on others. I especially liked how she was confronted with difficult decisions that had no clear ‘right’ response. Like most of us humans, she simply had to move on, carrying nothing but an uneasy and never-confirmed hope that she’d done the right thing. Altogether, September is a fallible, dynamic heroine, and I loved following her story.
Of course, the wonderful characterization doesn’t end with September. Her closest companions—A-Through-L and Saturday—were also fully formed characters, and I could easily see them starring in their own adventures. In fact, it seemed that everyone and everything in the novel had a strong, memorable personality, all the way down to September’s helpful coat. Even the villain, the Marquess, is far from the cardboard character one might assume her to be at her first entrance into the story. Fairyland is so wide and varied, and filled with such interesting characters, that I am sure Valente can find many different stories to tell there in the future.
My Rating: 4.5/5
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is, in my opinion, a children’s novel that has enough depth to be enjoyed by adults. The imagery is amazing, and the characters are memorable and very easy to love. September is a wonderfully tenacious, imperfect heroine, and even the villainess is the hero of her own story. While it has a lot in common with other child-whisked-away-to-magic-world stories, I think this novel’s individual strengths are its lovely writing, creative supernatural world, and the unexpected places Valente takes the story. This novel does feel complete, but it is clear that there are many more stories to be told in Valente’s Fairyland!
