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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. An intricate collection of fairy tales presented in the tradition of the Arabian Nights. Valente nests the stories within each other, often many levels deep, and weaves several threads of plot through the various stories for a resolution at the end. She draws on many ideas from classical stories— some of the exotic creatures she depicts are right out of medieval bestiaries and even Pliny— in creating her own richly detailed world. The frequent jumps up and down the levels of story recursion make it easy to put the book down, and it only turns into a page-turner toward the end. (  ) slothman | Dec 6, 2009 |  It took me all summer to read this book. In the end it was well worth it. Not easy reading but beautiful and complex. ( ) Realta_Dubh | Aug 28, 2009 | fastia | Jul 29, 2009 | I've had a habit lately of picking of books so complicated that they need to be read in one sitting or I lose the thread of narrative and then my enjoyment in the story. This wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, but I haven't had the headspace of late to sit like this. I either don't have the time on hand or I have the time but not the focus. I borrowed In the Night Garden from my library and returned half unread because the narrative was so complex and my time to read it was so fractured I could not appreciate it. It's like a novelist format of There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, an infinitely complicated framing structure, and unless I kept track of (1) who was telling what story, (2) which story that person belonged to, and (3) how those stories were related, I was entirely lost. What's worse is I think it’s a really good book and that this construct and invent is fantastically interesting, but I felt like I had to put it down now so that I could enjoy it more fully at a more opportune time. (  )1  noneofthis | Apr 24, 2009 | Nested tales in the tradition of 1,001 Nights are framed by a Sultan's palace, where one of the Sultan's sons dares to listen to the tales of an outcast "demon" girl who lives in the palace gardens. When I describe them as "nested", I mean it. One tale begins, a character in it has a tale of their own to tell, so that begins, and so on. I have yet to read witches done quite as well as Valente does here. Her witches are truly human, yet full forces of nature. The stories are also nested in the fact that characters reoccur, or their relations do. A very nice continuity drives the tales, with familiar or remembered characters appearing like treasure to the attentive reader, along with the promise that the girl's own story is something to hear. I found her situation, and interactions with the boy more interesting than many of the stories in the second half of the book. Which is to say: the girl becomes very interesting to me. Everything is very lush and sensual, from the plots to the language. Very enjoyable. (  ) storyjunkie | Mar 23, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:30:30 -0500)
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