I often find Catherynne M. Valente's work difficult to categorize (unless "Can I read it NOW?" counts as a category). I tend to conceptualize books based on what I read them for - fun characters, well-built fantasy world, interesting philosophical science-fiction, entertaining writer, and so on. But Valente doesn't really fit in to any of those mental maps. I mean, her stories are lovely, but tied up in the fact that her stories, as stories, WORK is the way that she weaves words together into a kind of poetry. Her language is almost spellbinding; it does that thing that I always want fantasy to do - catch you up in itself and make everything seem more vivid, more bright, more perfect. (If anyone has ever read Elaine Scarry's "Dreaming by the BooK", Valente does that thing that Scarry talks about where she uses colors and descriptions of light and opacity to make the images appear before your eyes...I think I've just written a review aimed at the audience of myself.)
Anyway, Valente is one of those authors who I can't help but read, but don't know how to recommend. Books with beautiful language! Books with gorgeous mythic imagery! Books that you don't want to put down because you're worried they're not real and might disappear when you're not reading them!
If any of those speak to you, try this book.

Wonderful, as always. Bujold is a joy to read and handles fantasy with the same eye for character that she has in sci-fi.

I'm looking forward to hearing more about the world of Chalion; she's one of the few authors who can write a series without recurring characters that I will read, because I know I will not be disappointed by the lack of old friends in the book; the new characters will be just as much fun to read.

Welcome to another round of "Liz writes reviews where she comes to terms with books".
I devoured Cold Magic and Cold Fire, the first two books in this trilogy, last year and have been...if not eagerly awaiting the conclusion, at least excited about it when I could remember there was life outside of work and exams. Elliott did not disappoint - I admit, I wondered how she was actually going to wrap up all the plot threads before the end, but perhaps the sign of a good epic fantasy novel is one where the plot always seems to overfill the boundaries of the book and the sign of a good author is that she retains control over everything nonetheless.
So I definitely enjoyed this series - I still maintain that this is one of the most intricately developed and fascinatingly crafted fantasy worlds I have read in a long time and the knowledge-hound in me is delighted every time I get a reference or figure out why something happened the way it did. But Elliott is also skilled at not stopping the plot to tell you everything and understands that the world has a certain amount of mystery in it as well. She also understands the unwritten rules for magic in fantasy - magic has to have rules, but it doesn't have to make sense. This is all a very long way of saying that Elliott knows her genre well and is one of the masters of the craft.
Which brings me to my second point - Elliott has successfully written an epic fantasy without the traditional chosen hero. Cat, though she is a wonderful protagonist to follow around, is not the chosen one, born to save the world. The battle for the fate of the world is not about good versus evil, it's about stagnation versus progress. And there are very few truly evil characters in this book and, even when they appear, they are not taking the roles you would expect. So while the trilogy focuses on struggle for the fate of the world and the battle of the resistance fighters against cruel oppression, Elliott grounds it not in supernatural evil but in the natural struggles of nations towards individual autonomy and democratic power. Which is awesome.
So why four stars?
It's a problem of character. And it's not that the characters are badly drawn (they are delightful) or stray out of character (they never do), but that they read to me as characters, not as people. This is not a rare problem in epic fantasy and I sometimes wonder if it's just one of those things endemic to the genre. At any rate, I found both Cat's inner monologue and most of the dialogue to be...not-quite-as-real as the world she was in. I had this sense, and I don't know why, of "people don't really sound like that or think like that". I wish I could articulate it better and I want to emphasize that this awareness had surprisingly little effect on my enjoyment of the book. I still think this is one of the most interesting, well-crafted and, frankly, brilliant epic fantasy novels I have ever read. But while the world of the Spiritwalkers came fully alive to me while reading this trilogy, the faces and voices of the characters did not.

So this one is marked as read before on Shelfari, but I'm almost positive this was my first read. These books fell off my radar at some point and I just never got around to finishing the series, well, catching up, really.

Anyway, another fine offering by Diane Duane. I like the fact that the books still feel innovative and fresh, even after such a long time and a somewhat repetitive story arc (though much better than most of fantasy).

I also find it interesting that they're moving towards cliffhangers and elements of the story that really span books. The earlier books were far more self-contained. Anyway, my affection for the series is still going strong and the questions that Duane raises and often allows her reader to think about rather than providing pat answers remains compelling.

This book was a tricky one; it didn't pull punches and was one of the sadder ones that Duana has written, but it was also exciting and compelling and a good read. I enjoyed the way it flowed naturally from the previosu book, more a sequel than a new installment, and I am still in awe of how well Duane doas at balancing character fidelity and evolution.
And I was so angry at the end of the book, but in the good way that means that the author got you and didn't let go and that's both a wonderful and profoundly scary vulnerability.
Still, ugh! I can't believe that happened!

The thing about Valente's writing is that she understands how to tell fairy tales and myths. Not that she retells fairy tales, but that she understands the language and style and levels of detail that go into telling such stories. She makes them work for her and makes language that would feel out of place or strange or overly lyrical work because she folds it into a larger narrative that is...evocative, but not quite like folklore.
In the Night Garden is one of her best works, a series of embedded and interlocking stories that unfold like a complicated puzzle-box, with each little twist revealing new possibilities and pushing against previous narratives. It's not a page turner, though each individual story is impossible to put down, but they have an Arabian Nights feel to them, both structurally and in the sense that you can't help but look forward to picking them up again.
Valente's language is polarizing, I think, which really just means that you either love the elaborate, poetic/folkloric flourishes in her style or find it distracting. That's a matter of taste but if her style fits your aesthetic, her stories are magnificent.

Well, this book was an experience. It might have been better had I remembered anything from the first book in the series. I know I had read it and a fe images and scenes have come back to me, but most of it is a blank. I'm not sure if it would have made more sense, though. I can never tell.
Rajaniemi is a fascinating writer, one who clearly enjoys playing fast and loose with language and who, like Mary Poppins, never explains anything. I was fascinated by this book and befuddled as well. It has a Clockwork Orange or possibly even James Joycian feel to it. Plot wise, it's delightfully madcap and, linguistically, it can feel impenetrable until you just give yourself over to it and let the story find a way to tell itself. It was a good read, though not entirely my cup of tea. It felt like it was too busy being a little of everything to truly be something.

Another absolutely wonderful book brought to you by the woman who "gets" magic and fairy tales and what it means to tell a specific kind of children's story. Valente is still writing in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and L Frank Baum, but, at the same time, manages to write a thoroughly timeless story. She understands how fairy stories and folklore works. She knows it and knows where it can be gently mocked and where it must be played quite seriously. She knows the games that you can play with fantasy and metaphor and she plays them well.
There are certain kinds of books (and, perforce, writers) who understand what it is I want from a fantasy novel in terms of language, of story, of character. Valente is one of them.

Sequels are always interesting creatures. This is one of the class that is like the original, although not quite as tightly developed, not quite as fully connected within itself and very clearly a middle book, a book to keep the readers involved and interested and up to date with the developments in the world. It is, in short, the second book in a trilogy. But the story remains interesting and the combination of writers means that both the science and the fiction is deeply enjoyable. The idea behind the story, of infinite numbers of iterating worlds, remains engaging and one of the most fun versions of "what if humanity could do X?" that I have read in a long time.
If you enjoyed the first one, this one is definitely worth picking up.