I wasn't quite enticed with this book as I had been with its predecessors, but nonetheless Valente's prose was as delightful as always and I enjoyed how September had matured throughout the series. As always I've marked my favorite passages for the review:

"The trouble with lies is that they love company. Once you tell a single lie, that lie gets terribly excited and calls all its friends to visit. Soon you find yourself making room for them in every corner, turning down beds and lighting lamps to make them comfortable, feeding them and tidying them and mending them when they start to wear thin."

"Music has more rules than math or magic and it's twice as dangerous as both or either."

"That's the first hint that something's alive. It says no. That's how you know a baby is turning into a person. They run around saying no all day, throwing their aliveness at everything to see what it'l stick to. You can't say no if you don't have desires and opinions and wants of your own. You wouldn't even want to. No is the heart of thinking"

"Take my hand, I know the way. Narrators have a professional obligation not to let their charges fall onto the pavement."

"You know what fate looks like, don't you? It's just a little toy version of yourself, made out of alabaster and emerald and a little bit of lapis lazuli and ambition and coincidence and regret and everyone else's expectations and laziness and hope and where you're born and who to and everything you're afraid of plus everything thats afraid of you."

"So it is written--but so, too, it is crossed out. you can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten."