Kepler's 2020 Project in the News:
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The problem with trying to review a book like "In the Night Garden" is that, as someone who isn't even in the league of Catherynne Valente's talent, I really lack the vocabulary to do it justice. It is all the adjectives a million book reviewers have used before: wondrous, beautiful, magical, lyrical, fantastical. How then to differentiate? To make it clear that it is all these things and beyond? Suffice it to say, then, that there is no other author who brings me the sheer literary joy that Valente does. Her use of language alone would keep me as a devoted reader - each sentence is so very new and precise and perfect that I often stop just to savor them - but her way of structuring story is a joy unto itself. This is the sort of book that makes you want to stop perfect strangers just to share a piece of the magic with them.I think what truly sold me on The Orphan's Tales was the feeling that it was a sort of flip-side to traditional fantasy - the other side of the Song of Ice and Fire coin. Within its tales are the dispossessed, those shunted aside by war, the women who are taken as war-prizes. Their voices are so incredibly powerful and deserving of being heard (or, properly, to be read). --Sarah L. |
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