The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne M. Valente
308 pages
Published 2016
Read from March 30 to April 1
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The Boy Who Lost Fairyland did not seem like the penultimate book of a series. I gave it a positive rating at the time, but I barely remember anything from it now, beyond the sense that it was directionless dilly-dallying, "a book-length narrative detour," as I called it in my review -- a long way to go, with an entirely new batch of characters, just to trigger a deus ex machina that could just as easily have been plopped down in ten pages tacked to the end of The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (which had felt like an incomplete novel anyway). So I was somewhat startled to find out that Valente's next Fairyland novel would also be the last. Perhaps the Harry Potter series had primed me to expect a seven novel series, but honestly, it just didn't seem to me that September's adventures in Fairyland had moved in the direction of resolution since, like, book two.
It took some time for All the Way Home to build its racing momentum, beginning as it does gummed down in the narrative tangle left by the Dodo's egg at the end of Boy. "Far too many people talk all at once," promises the description of the first chapter, and fully a third of the book went by before it hooked my interest. The marvelous creativity of the first two books had, by the time we got to Boy, diminished to "constant reminders of how edible everything looks" in Fairyland; that trend continues here, with the addition of rather annoying amounts of alliteration. But Valente's hand at allegory, while not allowed to frolic quite so much as I recall from the early novels, remains as expert as ever, twisting out chuckles as well as the aching sense of loss and confusion she wields so well. The end is moving and satisfying, albeit still rather sooner than I would have expected.
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