You have to approach this book as the prince does - let the stories wash over you, don’t try too hard to connect the threads. Valente’s words get into my head, and to me, that’s always the sign of a great writer - if my thought patterns start taking on characteristics of what I’ve read. The language is poetic, and I’ve seen some reviews posit that as a negative. These are stories with blood and bone at their core, and I adore them for it. And like the folktales of old, they don’t pull their punches. There is a familiarity even as everything is new and wonderful these stories would fit in perfectly well among their elder siblings that have been told and retold for centuries.

Indian and Arabian, Japanese and Russian, Finnish and German, African and Greek - layers on layers of cultural seasoning, mingling freely with each other. None of these stories are retellings of things you know do not look here for Snow White or Aladdin or Rama. I’ve described Valente before as steeped in mythos, and it shows here more clearly than in anything else of hers I’ve read. It’s the story of a phoenix and his feathers. It’s the story of how cities can die and mutate into something else. It’s the story of a three-breasted saint. It’s the story of a fox-woman who captains a ship of monsters. It’s the story of a girl who was a goose. It’s the story of how the stars fell from the heavens, and some got murdered, and one gets revenge. I could never recap everything that happens in the girl’s tales. Their unlikely friendship grows and coils around the stories she tells him.Īnd I sort of don’t even know where to begin. She reads the stories off of reflections, one eye at a time, and for years has nothing but them and the garden itself for company - until the day a little princeling encounters her and is brave enough to speak to her. Taken for a demon by the Sultan and his kin, the girl is abandoned in the garden and grows up half-wild and definitely a little eldritch. Valente has given us a new Scheherazade, a girl with stories etched indelibly on her eyelids. I’m reviewing the two books together because it really is all one story - but it’s also a thousand stories.

These were actually the first Valentes I read, back a few years ago, and they were a lovely place to start. It’s probably becoming apparent that I’ve turned into a ridiculous Catherynne Valente fangirl. Title: The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden and The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice

Orphan's tales in the night garden