The Girl Who Cirumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Catheyne M. Valente

So, Catheryne Valente has this series - five books planned, through published to date - about September, a girl from Nebraska who is transported to Fairyland once a year and has an adventure there.  The titles all start with "The Girl Who..." and conclude with some act performed in Fairyland.  Oh, how I love this series.  I hope that someday it take a place alongside The Chronicles of Narnia as one of English literature's best examples of the "child has adventures in a magical world" theme.  However, I seriously doubt that it will.  Let me tell you why.

The Fairyland the Catheryne Valente has created is a singular place.  Fairies, reindeer, Winds, living machines, stifling bureaucracy, and djinni who live unstuck from the normal movement of time are all found in Valente's made-up world.  And somehow, she makes them all fit.  This Fairyland doesn't have a single unifying theme (except maybe unfettered imagination); it doesn't have a logical set of rules (you kind of make them up yourself as you go along); and sometimes the magic looks a lot like science.  Or maybe the science looks a lot like magic.  Anyway, it's a delightful place, wonderfully realized, unlike any other Fairy realm I've encountered before.

And September, the Girl of the title, is an extraordinary main character.  She is snatched away from her ordinary late-1940's Nebraska home and embarks on her first adventure with hardly a backward glance.  She is bold, and daring, and smart, and thoughtful, and caring.  She has a romantic interest, but their relationship develops with subtlety and care; there's no love-at-first-sight Disneyfication here.  She struggles, and has doubts, and the occasional selfish thought. And that's why I think these books, however wonderfully written they are, won't ever reach the heights of Narnia or Harry Potter; September is just a little too real to fit what most people want from a fairytale.  And similarly, Valente's Fairyland itself isn't a saccharine fantasy of unicorns and rainbows; there is real trouble, real fear, real danger, and real courage in Fairyland and in September and her friends.

I hope, if you have some space in your reading list, and you like a good children's story that also appeals to adults, you'll give Fairyland a try.  My favorite character is the Ell, the literate wyvern who believes his father was a library.  An excellent dragon if you ask me; Ell could hold his head up next to Smaug and Temeraire with pride. 

Hey, speaking of Temeraire...I'll have to put his series on the list for a blog post.  Go look him up if you can't wait!

At the Mouth of the River of Bees - Kij Johnson

For the inaugural post on H&MLTR, I’m going to review Kij Johnson’s collection of short stories, At the Mouth of the River of Bees.  I read her novel The Fox Woman a few years ago and loved it, so I was excited to come across more of her work.  She often writes about Heian Japan, which is a fascinating time period and culture.

At the Mouth of the River of Bees shows Kij Johnson’s depth and breadth as a writer.  I found every one of the stories included original, creative, and engaging.  Four of the stories reflect her interest in Heian Japan and other Asian cultures (“Fox Magic,” “Chenting, in the Land of the Dead,” “The Empress Jingu Fishes, “ and “The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles”).  Many of the stories involve animals.  But those are about the only similarities I can find.  The settings of the stories range from the real world, to ancient Earth societies, to totally invented fantasy worlds.  The tone, voice, and structure of each story is different; some read like fairy tales, one reads like a Edwardian gentleman’s diary, and “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” is almost a novella. 

Synopses of a couple of my favorites from this collection (it was hard to choose):

• “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” – Aimee inherits a monkey act from a random stranger.  Twenty-six monkeys of varying ages, sizes, and species perform tricks in the show, with the finale being all of them piling into a bathtub and disappearing.  The monkeys reappear after every show, trailing into the tour bus where they and Aimee live.  Where do the monkeys go?  How do they get back? 

• “The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles” is the story of a young cat living in ancient Tokyo.  After her home is destroyed by one of the great Tokyo fires, she sets out on the Tokaido, the great road that ran from Tokyo all the way to the northernmost prefecture of ancient Japan, looking for a new one.  It’s a charming little adventure story, convincingly told from a cat’s perspective.

• Finally, “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” tells the story of an engineer sent to a rural area of his country to build a bridge over a river of mist.  There’s a water river below the mist, but the mist dissolves everything it touches except the fish that live in it.  This long story chronicles his slow absorption into the community of the area, the building of the bridge, and the effects that the bridge has on both sides of the river.  I can’t even really say what struck me so much about it; it was just a charming and well-written story.  I didn’t realize how much longer it was than the other stories in this book until I looked back at the table of contents and noticed the page numbers.

There are few short story collections that I can honestly say I like every single story in.  This is one of them.  I recommend it with no reservations.