2015 read #13: The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente.

The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente
235 pages
Published 2015
Read from March 13 to March 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

A book-length narrative detour that, as far as I can tell, serves no real purpose to the ongoing story of September, the girl who did quite a lot of things in and around Fairyland. We enter the story with the early childhood of Hawthorn, an ordinary troll boy, shortly before he gets swapped as a Changeling with Thomas Rood, a baby in Chicago. After a rough start, as if Valente herself wasn't quite convinced the series would go in this direction on its own momentum, the book finally gains some traction with some precious scenes of Hawthorn (now Thomas the Un-Normal) attempting to understand mid-century American toddlerhood and grade school from a Fairyland-ish perspective, and meeting with a Fetch or matchstick girl also left behind in a Changeling exchange. This is relatively unexplored territory, as unexplored as any corner of faery lore can be these days, so for a while I was engrossed with a sense of possibility and newness -- there was no telling where the story might go! Alas, even this portion of the tale feels weightless, lacking a certain depth or enthusiasm that Valente ordinarily brings to her work.

The Boy Who Lost Fairyland feels to me like little more than a protracted bout of writer's block nosing head-first into a publisher's deadline.

About halfway through the book, Hawthorn and Tamburlaine and their magically animated friends get kidnapped into Fairyland by a baseball that had been a troll king all along. Not that long ago, I found Valente's Fairyland "charming" and "whimsical" and "fuckin' precious" (from my review of "The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland, For a Little While," anthologized here). The first two books of this series maintained a nice balance of "Grim and Whimsy" (as I put it here), though even by book two I was noticing a creeping tendency for the narrative voice to shift into "Aunty Cathy tells a spooky yarn before bedtime." That finds full flower here, with a heap of Whimsy and a dearth of Grim, which wouldn't be so bad if Valente's heretofore reliable inventive fancy were also at its peak. The outlines of a creative, whimsical story are there -- the aforementioned baseball-troll-king, the matchstick girl designed to destroy but channeling her impulses into creativity, Blunderbuss the yarn wombat -- but for me, at least, the spark feels damped. Valente's descriptions of Fairyland, formerly evocative, have been stripped down to constant reminders of how edible everything looks. Far from fuckin' precious, the net effect is merely a case of the munchies.

And in the end, despite populating a book-length side trip with a whole new collection of characters, Hawthorn and his friends have essentially no effect that I can discern upon the situation of September and the balance of Fairyland. Two hundred pages of buildup and this new gang blunders into contact with September and her pals through sheer happenstance, have a game of brownie backgammon, and then Aubergine the Dodo peeks out over September's shoulder to admit that she's had a deus ex machina in the form of a dodo egg this whole time -- and it's not at all clear how, exactly, the actions of our new band of heroes prompted this belated (and flimsy) resolution. There's enough residual charm to carry the novel, but we seem to be reaching the Land of Diminishing Returns with this series.