The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne M. Valente

This final book in the Fairyland series finds September accidentally crowned the Queen of Fairyland. But there are others who believe they have a fair and good claim on the throne, so there is a Royal Race--whoever wins will seize the crown.

Along the way, beloved characters including the Wyverary, A-Through-L, the boy Saturday, the changelings Hawthorn and Tamburlaine, the wombat Blunderbuss, and the gramophone Scratch are caught up in the madness. And September's parents have crossed the universe to find their daughter.

Who will win? What will become of September, Saturday, and A-Through-L? The answers will surprise you, and are as bewitching and bedazzling as fans of this series by Catherynne M. Valente have come to expect.

It's tricky to say what I thought of the denouement of the Fairyland series. Indubitably, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is one of the best books ever written and it sets a standard by which nothing can compare, if purely because the novelty was part of the charm. Still, Valente is probably the most inventive, logophillic writer in the current generation. And she loves her characters with a deep intensity. But, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home feels more like a museum of Fairyland than an actual story. We go on adventures so that Valente can show off her cleverest, most beautiful creations one last time and love her most favorite characters again, but it feels distant. The stakes, which should feel serious, feel terribly shallow (and they are – the worst that will happen is that September will go home, which in theory will happen eventually anyway. Even when Saturday starts losing his memory, the story is so busy skipping around to Pandemonium and Maude and Lye and September's Shadow and Death and...that it never really focuses on the tension that something bad is happening.

So yes, it's lovely, and yes I will finish the series (I skipped book 4 – the Only Buying Books in Proper Bookstores and Not the Internet thing has fulfilled its deep nostalgic purpose – in my ongoing search for the 4th book, I stumbled on this one instead (in Kramerbooks when I should have been catching the metro to NIH for a very boring symposium) and since the whole point is to restore the deep appreciation for books because they're hard to come by from my youth (and, yes, supporting locally owned bookstores), reading series out of order seemed apropos.) but it's not the paragon of speculative fiction that its predecessors were.