DNF

Audiobook 2017:

I love Valente. Endstop. I'll probably read/listen to everything the lady puts out in every format. I've read her online journal game. I read her mailed once-a-month letters club stories for 2-3 years. I've tracked down her novellas, and drabble/snippets published across online magazines. I've belonged to her patreon since the moment it started.

I love Valente, and this was, again, no doubt of loving. This is a children's story of imagination, and our main characters are none other than the Bronte siblings. They fall into their own imaginary world, with both things (and people) they both have and haven't made up. They find themselves in amazing triumphs and deep dire straights, learning things about the worlds you make and the choices that change you as you are growing up.

I recommend this to adults who love Valente, and the four Brontes, and all children who loved Fairyland. ( )

Fun, wildly imaginative, but just not appealing to me at this moment in time. It's me, not the book. ( )

Delicious. The whole thing was delicious. ( )

Thought experiment: What would it be like to transport a handful of Regency-Era children from their playtime expositions into a very real and rich toyland stolen right out of their own noggins like Athena from Zeus's brow?

Add an amazingly rich assortment of famous real and imaginary personages of the time period showing up as children's characters their own age but as dolls, luggage, rags, pins, buttons, or ANYTHING that might be found in the playroom, stir, give vivid life, and then turn it into a rich drama full of intrigue and a war between Wellington and Napoleon, and it's *almost* a smidge like a much BETTER Narnia mixed with the delightful wordplay of Valente's Fairyland books, turned Regency and Hans Christain Anderson.

And it's a pure delight. It is absolutely for young readers, Middle-Grade, apparently, but it also doesn't dumb ANYTHING down, keeping the words right but never stinting on the hard questions or the tragedies or the heartache. Would it be one of those more difficult but infinitely more rewarding books for, say, 9-year-olds? Absolutely.

Is it rich enough for any adult to be transported and delighted by the wordplay and cleverness and the realness of the tale underneath the sheer imagination? Absolutely.

Of course, I'm biased. I'm a huge fan of Valente anyway and no matter whether she's writing for adults with very, very adult themes (read pornographic) or a battle between life and death or going for the humorous angle in Space Opera or Radiance or being utterly delightful with all five of her fantastic Fairyland books, I can't seem to get enough.

She's a master of the writing craft. I have no doubt about it. :) Pure gold. ( )