The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

This book is: delightful!
Other elements: spoons, keys, ominous hats, little girls, paternal libraries, flying felines, heroines who save themselves.
Read it: if you love fairy tales: the kind that are beautiful but can also give you nightmares, not the Disney kind.
Overall rating: 8.5/10

This was the first book I read in 2014 and I hope that it was an omen for the kind of reading year I’m going to have, because I loved it.

Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents’ house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. – Page 1

This book is take on the classic “girl is swept away to fairyland and has adventures” plot. But it’s not the basic plot that makes it glorious, it’s absolutely everything else.

Valente’s story is like nothing I’ve ever read before. It feels like discovering a classic fairy tale that I just had never heard – except that it’s not, it’s an entirely new thing. And a marvelous one. The complex but effortless world-building reminded me of some glorious combination of A Wrinkle in Time, The Wizard of Oz, and Narnia. The pull quotes on the front, back, and inside covers are glowing reviews from Neil Gaiman, Tamora Pierce, Holly Black, and Peter S. Beagle, which is both really impressive and totally deserved.

Here’s what Tamora Pierce says (and you know she’s in the top rank of author royalty in my book): “September is a clever, fun, strong-hearted addition to the ranks of Bold, Adventurous Girls. Valente’s subversive storytelling is pure magic.”

September climbed out of her kitchen window, leaving a sink full of soapy pink-and-yellow teacups with leaves still clinging to their bottoms in portentous shapes. One of them looked a bit like her father in his long coffee-colored trench coat, gone away over the sea with a rifle and gleaming things in his hat. One of them looked a bit like her mother, bending over a stubborn airplane engine in her work overalls, her arm muscles bulging. One of them looked a bit like a squashed cabbage. The Green Wind held out his hand, snug in a green glove, and September took both his hands and a very deep breath. One of her shoes came loose as she hoisted herself over the sill, and this will be important later, so let us take a moment to bid farewell to her prim little mary jane with its brass buckle as it clatters onto the parquet floor. Good-bye, shoe! September will miss you soon.  – Page 2

I realize I haven’t told you much about the book, but that’s because I think you should just go read it. Seriously. If what I’ve told you sounds good, move this one to the top of your TBR right now. You won’t be sorry.

The Elite by Kiera Cass.

This book is a lot like its prequel, The Selection, but slightly worse.

It tries to be darker, but it can’t really manage it. The characters are just too dumb, especially the idiotic protagonist, America Singer. The political aspects of the universe the story takes place in are also too poorly defined for the reader to get a sense of the greater implications of the rebellion that begins to reach the castle where America is living. It’s unclear what the risks are. It’s also hard to get worked up over rebel forces if you don’t know where they’re coming from, what they’re rebelling about, or even who they are beyond “Northern rebels” or “Southern rebels.”

This second book also attempts to focus on the love triangle between America, the Prince, and America’s hometown love, but (at the risk of being overly harsh) America’s reactions to the situation are so simplistic that she comes off as simply indecisive, or perhaps not bright enough to fully understand the difference between her swains. Love triangles have been popular in recent YA fiction and they’re gloriously entertaining and painful when well written (like in Hunger Games, Mortal Instruments, etc.).

This love triangle barely deserves the name. America has two suitors, and she prefers whichever one of them has paid attention to her most recently. Sometimes she feels distressed about having two suitors, but the reader doesn’t need to care.

I’ll say this, though: this book has a pretty cover.

Watch How We Walk by Jennifer LoveGrove.

This book is: brutally well written.
Other elements: Jehovah’s Witnesses, what it’s like to grow up in a very religious family, depression, being different, sister relationships.
Read it: if you love “the family next-door isn’t so normal after all” stories.
Overall rating: 7.5/10

Watch How We Walk is the story of a Emily, a young woman living on her own in a city for the first time. The book alternates in time between older and younger versions Emily: the first, rapidly becoming disillusioned with her family’s rigid Jehovah’s Witness lifestyle; and the second, trying to figure out how to live without it.

Emily’s strict childhood was a rotation of  church mandated lessons and activities, so overarching that, in one poignant scene, the reader sees young Emily reenacting religious services with her stuffed animals as a form of playing. When Emily the child first notices her old sister rebelling against their family’s ways, she’s shocked and horrified. In the flash-forwards to Emily of the future, it’s clear to the reader that she’s cut all ties with her family and her church. As both stories develop in parallel story arcs, the reader learns what cause the young Emily to finally decide to leave her family and see what it will take for the older Emily to truly strike out on her own.

I found this book fascinating. It’s very well written. the characters are complex and well written; LoveGrove manages to portray several individuals’ relationships to a demanding religious group without falling into simple cliché. She also manages to capture both Emily and her sister at multiple ages and writes in the voices of both older and younger Emily with chilling finesse.

Trigger warning: this book includes vivid descriptions of self-harm.

My thanks to NetGalley and ECW Press for providing me with a copy of this book for review.