I’d be lying if I said I know what happened in this third book by Catherynne Valente. The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland And Cut the Moon in Two, like its predecessors (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There), is a trippy adventure into an unknown landscape that requires you to allow Valente to lead you forward into the unknown. (And what I didn’t know until now is that this Fairyland series grew out of a reference to a book in a previous book that Valente wrote …).
This not your typical fairy story. Disney, this is not.
At one point, the narrator even interrupts the story, to let us readers know that the path ahead will be strange and winding. We need to hold the narrator’s hand and trust in the story.
Everything that goes down must come up again. When you leave the world, the going gets tough, whether you are a chemical rocket or a little girl. Take my hand, I know the way. Narrators have a professional obligation not to let their charges fall onto the pavement. (p. 89)
I still fell, and I am grateful for it. With the hero (of sorts) a girl named September; a blue-skinned magical friend from Fairyland with the name of Saturday; a red fire-breathing dragon getting smaller with every burst of flame due to a curse; and a fast-moving Yeti who is the midwife to the Moon itself … you get the picture. This is an adventure that will keep you off balance for days with each character wilder than the previous.
It is Valente’s writing that is the glue that holds it all together, thankfully. Her style of writing is unlike anything I have come across in recent years, as she both tries to build off the Alice in Wonderland narrative of “anything is possible if you withhold reality” and metaphorically tells of a girl, September, growing up and moving out of childhood, and what that means when you lose touch with your imagination.
You really do have to read the first two books to understand this third one, though, and even then … well …. you do your best. Me? I am now reading the fourth one: The Boy Who Lost Fairyland. (And yet another book just came out later this year: The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home)
I’ve never been able to get any of my students interested in this series, for whatever reason. Maybe it is the “fairy” reference in the title, or maybe it is Valente’s writing style and voice. The vocabulary can be a challenge, too. But it saddens me, because I think some of my higher reading students could plunge into the adventure and maybe never come out the other side.
Peace (in fairylands all around us),
Kevin