Here at last is something truly rich and strange - a rarefied dish to cleanse even the most jaded palate. In the Night Garden is a virtuoso feat of storytelling somewhere between Italo Calvino and Arabian Nights that has me wondering over its slyly subversive stories days after I finished. All of the stories herein begin with this one: an abandoned girl in a garden whose skin has magically been inscribed with minutely tattooed stories. Faced with her first and only potential audience, she is com...

I reviewed this book for the Women of Genre Fiction challenge hosted by Worlds Without End. I also review fantasy books weekly on my blog, The Other Side of the Rain. In the Night Garden is essentially Arabian Nights, if Scheherazade had been a feminist literary critic with a working knowledge of world mythology and a wicked sense of irony. Certainly, this Scheherazade wouldn’t have ended up marrying the Sultan who put his first 1,000 wives to the death.It starts with a young girl with dark t...

Reading this book has left me practically speechless. Almost anything I could say about it will fall flat in the sheer enormity of the experience.So what DID I experience?Scheherazade. Dark fables incorporating wide mythologies reminiscent of all the best obscure fairy tales twisted in wonderfully unique ways, couched as stories within stories, adding tiny slivers of fate within each until it brings us back, wholly, to our Scheherazade, our poor orphan telling her story from the words tattooed o...

Fans of creation myths, fractured fairy tales and stories in the key of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler will find plenty to love in this wondrous book of interweaving tales.Valente writes in a panoply of differing voices; her stories rich and unique in their telling – marvelously intertwined and displaying real writerly prowess. The reader is taken down the rabbit hole of tales, each telescoping deeper into a rich narrative replete with beautifully imagined monsters, the angels and devils of h...

Strange, fascinating, and mesmerizing. This has an old world fairy tale feel but is like nothing else. The stories within stories within stories... how did Valente keep track? And somehow it all fits together into a larger tapestry. The structure is a work of art, the language is enchanting, the stories sobering and realistic and fantastic at the same time. More, please.

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture," or so the old quote says. I can't help but remember this saying as I attempt to write down some of my fragmented, all too feeble thoughts regarding Catherynne Valente's masterwork, The Orphan Tales: In the Night Garden and In the Cities of Coin and Spice. To start out with a bang, I have to tell you what my reaction was upon completing the last page of the second book. It was 1am, and I set the book down, after having to re-read one of th...

I've read parts of The Arabian Night about thirty years ago. In the Night Garden succeeds in recapturing that sense of wonder, of exploring incredibly rich, exotic cities, meeting fantastic creatures, magicians, kings and vagabonds, sailing to mythical shores or descending into mysterious caverns. And Catherynne Valente managed this without copying or borrowing from the original tales.Her world may be inspired from different folk tales (I recognized Baba Yaga hut and people turned into birds, an...

I have loved or really enjoyed all of Valente's books that I've read. I'm a big fan. And while I quite enjoyed In the Night Garden quite a lot, there were moments when it feels like she was almost losing those strands of story, that they weren't being woven together quite enough and started to feel a bit snarled instead of simply messy.Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.In the mean...

This book was a truly magical experience. I came across it almost by accident looking for something to satisfy Mysopoethic award winner category for my reading challenge. I am very happy I did because "The Orphan's Tales" is definitely not something I would normally be interested in. This book is an Arabian Nights-inspired collection of stories that are nested within each other and cross over in the most unexpected places. The stories are not simple re-workings of old worn-out fairy tales. Now a...

One Thousand and One Nights meets European folktales and modern fantasy (think, perhaps, a somewhat more self-serious Princess Bride) in a nested series of linked short stories.* The overall frame, where a sultan's son is told the stories by an outcast orphan hiding on the palace grounds, is the least interesting part, but a good many of the other threads are incredibly effective, deftly examining and flipping gender roles, archetypes, tropes and cliches ("Never put your faith in a Prince. When

Tales within tales within tales, all woven together like a magical, colorful tapestry depicting griffins, dead moon walkers, beastly princesses, princely beasts, pirate saints, Stars, snake gods, and so much more, all written in dark ink around the eyes of a little girl. Reading Valente's prose is like dreaming; during the act, you understand everything and think you see the truth, but when jerked back into reality, the stories fade together into a colorful, abstract image. It's pretty and meani...

It’s true: This book is a fairytale masterpiece. At first, the book feels like it’s delivering small whimsical data dumps like beach waves. At some point, you forget you were at the shore. Now you’re sailing on an enormous boat and you can’t see land. Where did this boat come from? Do you ever get back to dry land? Do you ever care at that point? You’ll see what I mean if you end up reading this book. 😏With all seriousness, Valente is a creative powerhouse. The structure alone is worth appreciat...

This has taken forever for me to finish. I just didn't want to go back to it. The first part is beautifully written, but her prose feels very effortful, as if all the beauty had to be hammered out, line by line, and she wants you to see each stroke. It finally picked up, but the interconnecting stories create a jumbled mess of a plot, not at all helped by the fact that many characters live for centuries, therefore making a general timeline almost impossible to put together. Very prettily describ...

Book as arabesque. Short story leads to short story, each providing background and impetus for the next, characters answering questions to what led them to that intersection. It's a beautiful technique that comes back around to many of the original story characters. The trouble for me is that the short story makes it easy to put down and go do something else, as it's often a natural break in the plot and action, so it took me far too long to finish. More clues or story in the background setting

5.5 to 6.0 stars. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION and may make it on to me list of "All Time Favorites." This is an absolutely amazing novel that I believe could become a "classic" in years to come. A modern fairy tale told as a series of interwoven "stories within stories within stories" that all come together in one fashion or another (itself a brilliant achievement). This is a "one of a kind experience" and I can not wait to read the sequel. Nominee: World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (2007)W...

I guess what I really have a problem with is how the tales are told in this book. I was expecting a 1001 nights approach to it all. One night,one tale. You know the thing.But in this the stories just pile on top of each other, The girl starts out with a story and then someone in that story tells a story to another character and then we go into that story and so on.It was maddening to me and I lost interest in trying to follow the increasingly more confusing story.

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.I haven't read any fantasy quite like Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales duology. This is the story of a young orphan girl who is shunned because of the dark smudges that appeared on her eyelids when she was a baby. She lives alone in a sultan's garden because people think she's a demon and nobody will claim her. However, one of the young sons of the sultan, a curious fellow, finds her in the garden and asks her about her dark eyes. She explains th...

Tales within tales, tales out of space, tales that spring from stars that fall from sky to take human shape; the writer writes like the dreamer dreams dreams - some dreams yearning and romantic, others dark and tragic, each dream holding a little bit of the next dream in its heart: the story as Oriental Ouroboros: the Arabian Nights as template, as both starting point and point of resolution; themes and metaphors and symbols slowly surfacing, to disappear and then reappear again, transformed, re...

This is much the kind of book I would expect to be written by someone who changed her name to 'Catherynne', with that spelling—it's all fantastical creatures and quests and magic. It is a much more intelligent book than I expected, with stories nested within stories, and gender tropes are inverted (there are no damsels in distress here) to my great satisfaction. The maiden is the monster is the pirate; women can grow up to be fierce warriors.However, the Arabian Nights-style format can be a litt...

“Never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch.”So What's It About?A girl lives abandoned in a sultan's garden, and her eyes are covered with stories. When a boy ventures into the garden, he discovers the girl and the incredible magic of the stories she possesses; her tales introduce him to a world of beasts and monstrosities, stars and witches, princes and princesses, each with their own history of adventure, suffering, love and loss.What I ThoughtI have never r...