The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

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.