We Return to Fairyland

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

September stumbles back into Fairyland again only to find that her own lost shadow, who is now Queen of the Underworld, is draining Fairyland of its magic.

September is a year older and wiser, but even her familiarity with the laws of Fairyland can't quite protect her in the Underworld full of runaway shadows. Her traveling companions this time around are at once familiar and untrustworthy, and the Queen's new servant the Alleyman has the Underworld's denizens shivering with fear. (Though personally I found the Onion Man more sinister.)

Valente plays with the traditional rules of magic (my favorite was her EKT field: Everyone Knows That), though some of the speeches when September visits a Questing Physickist might be above the heads of younger readers.

The Physickist tells September and her new friend the Night-Dodo: "A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world." All the intricate charm of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland is back, making our second trip through this particular door as vivid and weird as the first.

Fairyland Fiction

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Being heartless, September does not hesitate to accept the Green Wind's offer to take her to Fairyland: once she gets there, she befriends strange creatures and is conscripted by Fairyland's ruler to complete a dangerous quest.

Terrible events befall our heroine, who may be heartless in leaving her home without a backward glance but who proves she is as loyal, compassionate, and tough as they come. Valente's book has all the strangeness and wonder required to narrate a story set in Fairyland. Her description of a fairy harvest feast is mouth-watering, and I loved the concept of Pandemonium, a city made of embroidered cloth. I especially appreciated the appearance of tsukumogami, which are natural denizens of Fairyland.

Bookish has two book trailers for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland.

Readers who enjoy this may want to check out its sequel, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, or Valente's upcoming collection of scifi/fantasy short stories set in Japan:  The Melancholoy of Mechagirl.

You might also try Kelly Barnhill's Iron-Hearted Violet, about another brave girl adventurer. Or go back to the book that started it all, and is the clearest ancestor of Valente's fairy tale: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.