Books by Catherynne M. Valente
language
English
series
review 1: This third installment starts out beautifully and it has some really poetic, touching elements but it fizzles out big time. It's a little frustrating because Valente is such a talented writer but she goes overboard and burdens her stories with too many frills and weirdnesses, wit...
language
English
series
review 1: This is a lovely lovely book, full of whimsy and enchantment and imagination. Valente has a wonderfully delicious mind that produces all sorts of fantasical senarios, characters, and objects. I am arrving at this a little backwards (which I don't think the author would mind) as t...
language
English
review 1: I do enjoy fairy tale retellings and this one sets Snow White in the 19th century West, where Puritan magic is in conflict with Native American magic. It's a fast-paced tale (lots of short chapters with very long titles), and it has all the familiar elements: the beautiful child ...
language
English
series
review 1: This is a book club book, so just a brief impression for now. I'm sure that my misgivings with this text will be part of the later discussion. There were times when I did not enjoy this book, and other parts that were excellent. The language was good, the story, obfuscated at ...
language
English
review 1: Beautiful and amazing. My personal favorites include "The Melancholy of Mechagirl," "Fifteen Panels Depicting the SAdness of the Baku and the Jotai," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time," "Fade to White," and "Killswitch." As you can probably guess, this is just about half ...
language
English
review 1: This anthology is really fascinating and original. I was reading random lines of random books in the library when I became riveted by these stories. The characters and their motivations are compelling and real, even as the settings are rich, fantastic, and largely metaphorical. I...
language
English
series
review 1: This was adorable! But it was much more Grimm's style than I expected it to be. The author really borrowed a lot from the storytelling traditions of old--relatively little description, almost no exposition at the beginning of the story, uniformly practical language and sentence s...
language
English
series
review 1: I am thinking 3.5 star. But really, that is probably not a true reflection of my thoughts because this is such an unusual book. I am still thinking about it. It is like Russian fairy tales get turned every which way in the context of revolutionary and Stalinist USSR. It often ...
language
English
review 1: This one is very different. I'm a big sucker for the kind of urban fantasy, hidden worlds setting it's about, but the style it's written in - very descriptive, very immersive, with a plot that's almost secondary to the worldbuilding - was a bit hard for me to get into. And the fo...
language
English
series
review 1: As usual Valente does a good job of creating a bizarre and yet very real universe. This book continued in her trend of beautiful but visceral phrasing and she makes it come alive. The twisting of the story and the empty spaces were compelling and I finished feeling unsatisfied bu...
language
English
review 1: This one reminds me of some of my favorite stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the kind that make the subscription worth it. 99.9% of the story takes place inside the virtual reality of a human/machine dreamworld, so expect even more of Valente's gloriously ...
language
English
series
review 1: This story is magic, but not magic in the clinical sense spoken between adults who don’t believe any more. This story is the word whispered between two small children who believe will all their little hearts. It’s myths and histories and imagination swirling together into a rio...
language
English
review 1: What happened?! I loved The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, loved it. This one, on the other hand... It was an afterthought, a sad little bubble of a story that did not do anything for the reader. Valente's style is vaguely reminiscent of Andersen's, but it lacks his natural ...
language
English
review 1: Questo breve racconto, originariamente pubblicato su Tor.com, funge in realtà da prequel al primo volume della serie, La bambina che fece il giro di Fairyland per salvare la fantasia e ci mostra come la giovane Malva passò dall’essere una ragazzina pratica che viveva per conto pr...
language
English
review 1: Why Read: I mostly chose these books for the reason of an author bond. Normally upon finding a new author that I absolutely adore, I feel the need to read as many books as I possibly can. In Catherynne Valente’s case, this stemmed from ‘Labyrinth’, her first novel that is availab...
language
English
review 1: While I love Valente's language (which is beautiful and awe-inspiring), I often felt like I was running just to keep up with her references to more obscure stories classic mythology. The poems where I understood her references or which didn't reference specific stories at all wer...