Boy Who Lost Fairyland (Fairyland, 4)

The Boy Who Lost Fairyland is the fourth in the FAIRYLAND series by Catherynne M. Valente, and the second in a row that has been somewhat of a disappointment and the first whose strengths I thought were not enough to fully overcome its flaws.Valente takes a bit of a risk here in book four, shifting focus from her primary protagonist, September and her friends, to a whole new cast of characters. The titular “boy” of the book is Hawthorn, a young troll scooped up by the Red Wind and dropped off in our world as a changeling, where he lives as a “Not Normal” boy for some years before encountering Tam, another changeling. Eventually, the two of them realize their true selves and make their way back to Fairyland, and it is there that their story will intersect with September’s, although not until the very end.To begin with the positives, Valente’s trademark whimsy and linguistic/creative ingenuity are on their usual full display here, as we are treated to a host of wholly original creations: a Sunday Dinner tree, a walking/talking gramophone, albino moose with barbed tails, “a cutlass named Hush, a ship made of jester’s caps, and … twenty levitating hyenas who couldn’t say the word yes as they’d been cursed by the Khan of Zebras.”Even better though, then her inventive descriptions of Fairyland is how Valente takes our mundane world and, by showing it through the eyes of the young Hawthorn (now named Tom in his human form), turns it into a fairyland filled with its own fantastical actions and objects, as when he thinks of his mother’s special brand of magic:She could make music come out of a great brass thing in the parlor that looked like a horn of plenty but wasn’t one. She could make blue fire roar out of the stovetop anytime she pleased. She could make hot milk or cocoa or caramel or porridge appear inside a silver saucepan — he never knew which it would be … [she] would lay her finger alongside her nose, and then tap his, and say: “Magic!” … “ Gwendolyn said it when she produced a new toy that he hadn’t seen her making …when she made all the lights come on at once with one touch of her little finger to the wall or when his wooden train carriages went spinning around their wooden track with no one touching them.Climbing into the head of this new-to-our-world outsider (aren’t all children this?), Valente makes us see the wonders of the world around us in a new, well, magical light.Another plus is how despite the above magical description, she does not shy away at all from painting Tom’s experiences in this world in a darker, much more sad light. He does not, after all, fully belong here (don’t all children sometimes feel this?) and he unconsciously takes out this feeling on the things around him, and so “The childhood of Thomas Rood was full of broken things.” He tears down curtains, takes a hammer to the flagstone path, tears apart stuffy animals, “weep [s] in fits of frustration.” All because “All his life he had known that something was wrong. It was only that he did not know what it was. He felt all the time as though there were another boy inside him, a bigger boy … a boy who knew impossible things … But whenever he tried to let that boy out, he was only Thomas, red-faced, sputtering, gangly, clench-fist Thomas.”Valente has never been one to sugar coat her worlds, even (perhaps especially) in her books aimed as much at children as adults, and much of this is truly painful: his father’s disappointed acknowledgment that Thomas was “Not Normal,” his acting-out of his frustrations, his “Rules of the World”, a list of behaviors and knowledge he must write down and teach himself even though “Other children understood them easily. Normal Children.”But despite the moving sections on Tom’s frustrations and the general fecundity of Valente’s imagination, as mentioned, the book was mostly a disappointment for me. One reason is that all those rich, fertile inventions of fairies and places and strange animals and pencil magic and trees and post offices and special shoes and and and felt early on to be more of a exhaustive catalog of “neat strange things” than part of the narrative. It was not far into the book before I was telling myself, “Not everything needs to be list” —a list of metaphors, of images, of cool creatures, etc. It all felt overly manic. The nearest analogy I can come up with is how some sci-fi/fantasy movies will throw in a bunch of special effects because they can, but those effects do not serve plot or character or tone; they’re just neat effects.Another issue I had was that save for the early section in Tom’s youth, I just didn’t find these characters particularly engaging or interesting. I had the same response to September in the earlier books, but those books’ strengths greatly outweighed that reaction. Here, there wasn’t enough to overcome the problem. One reason is that the plot as well was not all that compelling, feeling a bit scattered, episodic, and with the main characters sort of meandering around and reacting to encounters, some of which seemed to mostly become a reason for another catalog of neat ideas/names. Pacing was an issue, with the story slowing down in several places, and really for the first time in this series, I struggled with continuing on, putting the book down several times and picking it back up with little enthusiasm to finish, despite its relative brevity (just over 200 pages). Finally, while the other books have always been layered in terms of their audience, offering up rich opportunities for both adults and children, here that balance seemed slightly off.The Boy Who Lost Fairyland has its moments, and one can’t help but marvel at Valente’s inventiveness. But problems that have always lain below the surface in earlier books here rise to a more noticeable level and have a more deleterious effect on the reading experience, leaving me to wonder if perhaps my time in Fairyland is coming to a close, whether the series does or not.(original review on fantasyliterature.com)

“If you have ever seen a falling star, you have seen a Changeling arriving”Catherynne M. Valente’s fourth Fairyland novel, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (2015), begins with the Red Wind and her flying panther spiriting away from Fairyland a reluctant troll boy called Hawthorn (he’s been happy at home with his magical parents and huge pet toad), and sending him to Chicago, where he becomes a Changeling called Thomas, replacing the human infant son of the Roods. The neat thing about this novel in the context of the series is that while the first three books feature September, a girl from Nebraska, visiting Fairyland, this one depicts Hawthorn, a “boy” from Fairyland, visiting our world.The common element is the child protagonist as stranger in a strange land, and one of the many sources of pleasure in reading this novel lies in Valente’s imaginative depiction of Hawthorn’s Fairyland perception of real-world things like apartments, pancakes, and “the Kingdom of School,” wherein “A Teacher is the same thing as an Empress only a Teacher wears skirts and uses a ruler instead of a scepter,” and “There is a curse called Homework a Teacher may cast if she longs for her power to continue after the great bell has rung,” and “a peculiar breed of demon-wights called Report Cards” guard the Kingdom.There’s a wonderful, painful chapter depicting Hawthorn/Thomas’ inability to assimilate to life in Chicago, because his experience as a troll in Fairyland when he could talk with stones and everything was alive makes him constantly tear apart his toys and other things in the Rood home in his frustrated efforts to get them to respond. On top of that, he’s always uttering fanciful “nonsense” about things like the King of Pancakes or calling his human mother a witch because she can do things like flick a switch to light up the house and make blue fire roar out of the stove top, after which she says, “Magic.” Thus, his father is always saying the boy is not Normal, despite the Changeling trying to be as Normal as possible by writing down the “laws” of our world in a notebook called Inspector Balloon (he hopefully names everything because without a name a thing can’t exist and can’t talk to you).The friendship between Hawthorn/Thomas and a fellow Changeling he meets at school, a wooden fetch girl called Tamburlaine, is funny, unpredictable, and moving. The novel soon has the pair and their animated object companions, a feisty scrap-yarn wombat toy called Blunderbuss (who says she’s a “combat wombat” from the Land of Wom) and a gramophone called Scratch (who communicates by playing scene-appropriate records) returning to Fairyland. There they are seized by the mobile Capital city, Pandemonium, where the current monarch, Charlie Crunchcrab, sets them on a quest to get him out of being King without having to die first (for “Fairy countries mate for life”). They’re advised to find the mysterious and disreputable Spinster, who may be able to help. They meet human Changelings, learn about their exploitation, and more, as Valente reverses the direction of the novel’s defamiliarizing culture shock from aliens visiting our world to aliens returning home. The way she works it all out is interesting and neat.Whereas I found the third Fairyland book, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (2013), turgid and hyperventilating (filled with characters reciting lengthy exclamation mark punctuated monologues), this book is a pleasure from start to finish. Despite being shorter than the previous volumes in the series, it has just as many delightful and imaginative fantasy elements and rich and playful lines. Like these:Fun Fantasy Riffs“All trolls are skilled in the Dark Arts of Penmanship, owing to the heroics of Tufa, one of the three Primeval Trolls. Tufa, shortly after solving the mystery of walking upright and making friends with bridges, hunted down a wild Alphabet and made it her pet. Alphabets are one of the longest-lived creatures in all the grand universe. The Troll Alphabet lives still in the Heliotrope Hills, grumbling to itself, devouring passing slang, and blessing, in the small ways an Alphabet can, the folk that tamed it when the world was young.”Imaginative and Vivid Descriptions“His troll-self stretched and reached up from his belly, popping its aching joints, pushing aside all the bits of him which were not-troll, straining toward the pencil with jaws open. The troll was ready. Finally, it was his turn. The troll in Thomas seized the end of the pencil in his own sharp teeth and chewed it into a fine point, delirious with the happiness of having something to do. It felt like biting into a quarter and spitting out pennies.”The familiar made new“Any city looks a bit like its mother and father.”Witty, Playful, Self-Aware Narrator“Do you remember being born? Only a few can say they do and not be caught immediately in the lie, and most of them are wizards. I, of course, remember it perfectly. Certain benefits are granted to narrators as part of the hiring package, to compensate for our irregular hours and unsafe working conditions. As clear as waking, I remember your hands on the cover of the book, your bright eyes moving swiftly over the pages, the light of your reading lamp, your small laughs and occasional puzzlements.”Wisdom for YA Readers“Everybody’s strange everywhere. Most of the trick of being a social animal is pretending you’re not. But who do you fool? Nobody worth talking to.”I have only a small criticism and a medium one: Valente can misuse lie/lay, as in “Equator is a great fat serpent who lays around the whole world,” and the book doesn’t really end but serves as a prelude to the fifth and final novel in the series, as, the third, fourth, and fifth books make one story arc.Luckily, this book revived my desire to finish the Fairyland series. Readers who like fantasy with original imagination, playful narrators, and rich language should enjoy Valente’s series, but should start with the first one, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (2011).

Great continuation of the series introducing new characters and taking it in a new direction after a bit of a dip with book 3. Still annoying typos throughout the series with gaps between words, confuses meaning.

I've been reading Fairyland since it was being posted chapter by chapter on the Internet for free. While I balked at the prospect of a book not starring September, I adored this nonetheless and thought it brought a nice bit of fresh air to an already fantastic series.

AAA+++