The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland: Formidable Flights of Fancy

Children's literature is a repository of the most imaginative and astonishing tales ever devised by mankind. Books like The Hobbit, the Harry Potter series, or The Chronicles of Narnia - originally purported to be solely for the amusement of children - were too brilliant to be ignored by adults and they quickly transcended the publisher's imposed age limit. Now there's Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland series, which easily manages to make the leap from children's fiction to modern classic.

Starting with The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Valente tells the story of September, a twelve-year-old girl in Nebraska whose father is away fighting in World War II and whose mother works in an airplane engine factory. Like every child in a fantasy novel, September longs for adventure and one day she is visited by the Green Wind who whisks her off to Fairyland. There she proceeds to have many adventures with her newfound friends, a wyvern named A-Through-L who aspires to be a librarian, and a marid named Saturday, who gradually and complicatedly becomes September's love interest.

The first book is an absolute revelation, containing a series of witty observations, fanciful imaginings, and riotous beauty. Every chapter unlocks a brand new weird and wonderful thought or situation. September is a remarkable literary heroine, introspective and brave, keen to help others but tinged with the inevitable selfishness of the budding teenager. As she grows from a heartless child to a girl alive to the pains of romance, the series promises to become even more emotional and intricate.

Valente loves wordplay, riddles, and lush descriptions, and her Fairyland is a wondrous place that is both frightening and inviting, dangerous and delectable. The second and third books in the series have become increasingly esoteric and I find myself just wallowing in the words as opposed to paying much attention to the story. These books might be slim novels but each one dispenses a concentrated dose of wonder and fantasy that will dazzle your senses and make you marvel at what an author can do with her imagination and the English language. So go find these books and get lost in Fairyland.