Catherynne M. Valente

Valente creates a classic children's fantasy adventure in the vein of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with touches of Terry Pratchett and Lemony Snicket. September, a twelve-year-old girl from Omaha, Nebraska is drawn into Fairyland. Soon agrees to help some witches by stealing back a wooden spoon from Fairyland's tyrannical ruler the Marquess. She is helped by A-Through-L, a hybrid wyvern and library, and a marid named Saturday. But the Marquess gives her another quest, to recover a magical sword, while simultaneously hindering all of September's efforts.

And all of this happens well before September circumnavigates Fairyland in a ship of her own making. This novel is wonderfully imaginative and funny, deconstructing fantasy literature while also celebrating it. I expect to be reading more novels in this series.… (més)

This is a fantasy novel about a kid who goes into a magical forest in order to fulfill his role in an ancient treaty between humans and the creatures of the forest. Though I have enjoyed some of Valente's work (she had three works on the Hugo short fiction ballots last year, and they were all strong), too often I am left feeling that if it had been half as long, it would have been twice as good. Most of her books are overnarrated; perhaps in deference to the younger audience, this mostly manages to avoid that (though the narrator is still twee and condescending), but instead fills up the pages with voluminous "funny" dialogue that goes nowhere. At one point the main character gets horns on his head but doesn't know it, and somehow there is a full ten pages of back-and-forth between Osmo being confused at another character saying "what's up with your head?" and someone finally saying "you've got horns!" By about page one hundred, this book had squandered all of its goodwill and I did not care about what anyone was trying to do, but there were another three hundred pages I had to read.

It's a kind of bad that annoys me: like Seanan McGuire's, Valente's YA is self-consciously nostalgic in a way I find forced and annoying. Rather than capture what the fantasy of our childhood was actually like, it very archly tries to capture our nostalgia for reading fantasy in childhood—which isn't the same thing at all. Oz may be a fairly whimsical place, but the book doesn't smash your face into this fact, it just gets on with taking the world seriously. I don't believe actual young adults (or middle-graders, which is what Osmo Unknown skews toward in my opinion) would actually like this book. It's for adults nostalgic for when they were supposed to be reading young adult fiction.

I did like the pangolin character a bit.… (més)