It's been a week of disappointing sequels in my life. Not that the Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two isn't good. It's good, it's just the two prior novels are Oh My Goodness, turn cartwheels, no scoring system goes high enough, amazing. And The Girl Who Soared is good. Maybe even very good, but no better.

Valente's previous works have been a patchwork of disparate settings and characters all loosely bound together in service of a plot, and somehow it just seems to work. Here, the settings are just as magical: a lizard made up of coins guards a cash register that determines your occupation, a whelk has made its shell into a city fueled by its love, acrobats made of paper fold and unfold as they do tricks, and an entire world made up of photographic negatives feature (sadly, while much is discussed about the city of Orrery, which is an Orrery and has every type of "-scope" imaginable, we spend very little time there.) But the threads tying them together feel looser. Zooming from one place to another felt organic and natural in the earlier books. Here it feels frenetic, and I found myself having trouble following why this or that was happening.

Similarly, the other Fairyland books center around themes of Coming of Age and particularly issues of adolescence, in a way that is central, but not overbearing. Here the central theme -- how one develops an identity and how volitional that identity is -- is equally universal and equally foundational to the book, but its inclusion feels more heavy-handed.

I certainly enjoyed the book, and I certainly will keep reading the series, but just as certainly, it pales by comparison. ( )

A nice distraction. ( )

Still beautiful and lyrical and lovely, but it takes awhile to build up to the story. And it gets a little weird, but not in the charmingly weird way the Fairyland books have been so far. ( )

This was gorgeous and amazing as predicted, as one would know if one was reading all the other books in this series. I was so glad to see September reunited with the right versions of her friends, all of them going through new things and reacquainting themselves.

I love the continue play with time (all the September choices, and memories, and her boy's careful, confusing, wonderful timelessness and September's own vanishing and how it effects those who love her), and I cannot even begin to express how madly cackingly gleefully ready for the next book I am based on the last page. Bring it on. ( )

Otherwise titled "The Book of Tantrums, Growing Up and Being Lost"

I wonder if mine was a peculiar edition?
Candlestick showed where she could not possibly be, and the car kept right on changing pronouns.
I daresay, looks like Editing skipped its duties for a bit here and there.

There was A LOT of lecturing.
And not to say that the book wasn't interesting, but I could tell there was something fishy going on with the Yeti. (No fear! I shan't say more.)
The mood and narration call for a more mature reader than the previous two books. Or at least more patient one.

THAT ENDING. I can certainly see why Blue Wind is so thoroughly disliked. I would thump her most soundly and thrash her till all the teeth fall out.

Overall, I'm quite glad that the next book won't be about September directly, but more tangentially. And there is something to be said for the unexpected growing a sheen of predictability.

I would only recommend this book to someone already deeply invested in Fairyland (as most of us, who started from book-one, already are).

I think I may take a break from Fairyland for a bit. Maybe. ( )