Customer Reviews

The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden

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If I had followed my impulse in the first 50 pages of The Orphan's Tales, then I never would have finished the book. I was actually irritated by the book. The prose struck me as bad Tanith Lee and I just knew that the structure of the book was going to irritate me.

However, I did not stop reading. The book had been recommended strongly by someone I really respect, so I decided that I would give it an honest try. After the irritation, I was interested, and after that I was entranced. By the last few hundred pages of the book, I literally could not put it down. I read it late in 2006, but I would be willing to include it as being among my best reading experiences of the year.

Valente's prose may seem labored and precious at first, but if you give it sufficient time it settles into its own rhythm. Her diction fits beautifully with the structure of her work. Some writers who try the same kind of prose miss any sense of lightness or humor. Valente, by contrast, is as often wickedly funny in her stories as she is full of descriptive symbolism. I liked it every much in the end, and I was left with the strong sense of wanting to read more.

The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden is dark fantasy, structured as a series of interlocking stories. It should appeal to both younger and more adult readers although the themes can be quite adult. Highly recommended, particularly if you are fan of darker fantasy.

If you had asked me a couple of years ago what my favorite fiction book was (except that's a very hard question, of course), I would have probably said American Gods or Diamond Age.

I still love those books, but this is my new favorite.

It is hands down the best book of fairy tales that I've ever read, and probably the best fiction book. Just like the Arabian Nights, it is a series of nesting tales with an over-arching narrative to frame it. But every single tale is original here (and yet so archetypally familiar), and the tales and the meta-narrative are much more intertwined and integral, and tell an epic tale of a world almost our own.

It's a tale about a young girl in a palace garden, cursed to exile until she has told all of the stories tattooed around her eyes, and of course the stories themselves, stories of pirates and living ships, the deaths of Stars, of slave wizards and bitter old witches, of princes and beast maidens, heretic papesses and jeweled cities, body thieves and skin peddlers, monsters and saints and mathematician kings. They are stories of strong women, of men ambitious and passionate and despondent, of cruelty and kindness, of making hard choices and facing the consequences, but also of plain silly wonder. They are lucid and lyrical, and a little bit painful, like True things are, and filled with longing and fear and beauty and blood and love and fierce joy.

This book made me cry several times, sometimes because of the story, and sometimes just out of relief and recognition -- this is how tales should be told, wisely and fearlessly. I have been a fan of Valente's writing for a while, but this is her most brilliant and straightforward and accessible book yet.

I cannot recommend it enough.

This is Cathrynne Valente's sixth novel, and her first one with a major publisher. It is a gorgeous retelling of fairy tales--not the whitewashed, bland and Disneyfied versions that too many people have grown up believing to be the "real" versions of these tales. No, these are dark and mysterious versions where evil is not readily thwarted and salvation does not immediately equate "happily ever after."

This is not to say that the tales are dour, Hans Christian Andersen morality plays. Far from it. There is much joy and passion in the stories, but there are many surprises as well.

The Orphan of the title is a girl of noble descent who was born under an unfortunate curse - she is marked in a way that incites fear in the extensive household of the Sultan, and no one will claim her for their own. Eventually abandoned to the garden, she does not die but instead thrives, living there as a sort of spectre until a young son of the royal family stumbles upon her and she begins telling him the tales that are her destiny to tell. The story of a prince's quest is brought short by the witch he encounters, who tells her story to him, which necessarily includes the story of her teacher, and so on, tales within tales like the layers of an onion.

You will recognize the skeletons of some fairy tales beneath Valente's rich layering of interpretation. Others are obscure (the woman has done her homework) or obscured to the point of being completely fresh. There is a feminist twist to the tales, but not the kind of heavy-handed moralizing that frequently burden such retellings. Instead, the layered tales take you deeper and deeper into an amazing world that you really regret leaving upon turning the last page. The one consolation is realizing that this is but the first of four books and you will be able to find your way back to the Orphan and her tales again when the next book is published.

The writing itself is a confection of imagery, rich and sumptuous. It's a book to luxuriate in.

I can't think of a better Christmas present for someone who loves fantasy, particularly since it is illustrated with gorgeous drawings as well.

Go now. Buy. You'll thank me.

Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden (Bantam, 2006)

There are, at most, a handful of writers currently working who are as much on love with the English language as Catherynne Valente. Each of her novels is a small jewel for the linguaphile, as much an experience as it is a book. Her early novels tended to run about one hundred fifty pages, and with language that demands lingering over and pondering, one hundred fifty pages seemed just about perfect. Now comes the pair of books known as the Orphan's Tales. The first of them is as long as Valente's first three novels put together (and the second longer); no surprise, then, that I ended up lingering over this book for an entire year. Actually, one day shy, to be precise about it. I can't imagine doing it any other way; this is a book that demands to be lingered over, pondered, enjoyed.

The book is told as a series of nested (very nested) fairytales; there is one large frame, concerning a girl whose body is tattooed with tales and the prince fascinated with her. Within that frame are two large stories the girls tells the prince. Within each of those are dozens of subtales, as characters within the stories tell tales (and characters within those stories... you get the idea).

The most impressive thing about the book by far is that things never get out of hand. If you get the idea of the structure here (the thing it most reminds me of, oddly, is modular bookshelves), you can probably see how easy it could be for a reader who isn't paying attention to lose his place. Despite the complexity, it never happens. Whether this is because I was just paying more attention than usual or whether it's Valente's storytelling skills I don't know. Oh, of course I do. I have the attention span of a whelk. Valente was in control through the entire book. The language is gorgeous, but that's a given with Valente; one expects nothing less. I wondered whether Valente's dense style would scale well to a book three times the length of those I'm used to reading. I shouldn't have worried; as always, this is phenomenal. ****

I agree with the reviewer who found the first 50 pages of the book irritating. There is so much description and over-the-top sensuality that you start to wonder if you are going to be reading a romance novel instead of a fairytale/fantasy novel. Keep reading. It is more than worth your while. The author has created an unforgettable world which, while recognizable to lovers of myth and fairy tale, manages to be intriguingly different--at times tragic, at times hilarious. The author shows you the same story lines from different angles. Characters appear in the threads of other characters where you least expect them. The book is intricate and colorful and extremely sensual. If you enjoy Susanna Clark, Neil Gaiman's novels, George R.R.Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, and Jane Yolen's fairy tales, there is a good chance you will like this book as well. That is not to say that this author's style resembles any of these authors, rather that the subject matter and story-telling skill is similar.

The girl with ink-stained, story-stained eyes climbs to find the young Prince night after night to tell him her stories. He objects, complaining that it is always she who is coming to find him and carry him away, and he tells her that that is typically the job of Princes, not girls.

"This is not that kind of story," the girl responds.

And it's not. It is a series of fairy tales nested within each other, and others have already made the obvious structural comparison to the Arabian Nights. But these stories are different, and the same. They are fairy tales to the point where reading them is like coming home.

This was a comfort book the first time I read it; as soon as I opened the cover, I realized that we already knew each other's names.

The stories are new, though, and I have not read them elsewhere before. The characters have their own voices, and their own lives. This is not a book where maidens exist solely to be rescued, nor is it a book where all the women are impossibly strong and the men weak beside them. It is a book filled with archetypes, as all good fairy tales are, but it is populated also with people, and some are strong and some are not, some are female, and some are male, and all are real.

All that without losing the beautiful imagery and language of her earlier works.

Others have written excellent reviews on the content and style of the tales so I shall not attempt to pointlessly reinvent the wheel here. Suffice to say this book is an outstanding example of the boundless creativity of the artistic imagination. I bow to the author's genius.

There's only one point that I wish to point out: this book has a truly staggering amount of blood in it. Murder, rape, treachery, torture, human experiments, genocide, incest, patricide, even deicide... If an atrocity can be imagined, well, it is here.

I have heard it said that when the likes of Andersen and Grimm first compiled their tales of folklore and fairy tales, they had to first bowdlerize them, "scrub them clean," as it were, to make it palatable for the consumer habits of a rising European middle class. For example, in some earlier versions of Snow White, the young woman's chief antagonist is her mother, not stepmother. The Orphan's Tales is the world unscrubbed.

It's not just that magic must be paid for in blood. Here, magic literally is blood. And no, there is no other way to get blood.

It is hard to talk about a story as well-written as "In the Night Garden" without resorting to metaphor. The weaving together of plot, setting, and character, the embroidery of perfect prose, the individual strands that, when reviewed from the perspective at end of the book, paint a gorgeous landscape in our very imaginations. But no metaphor that I could settle upon truly conveyed the deep love and heartfelt awe that I felt for this book by the time I turned, far too soon, the last page.

In the Night Garden does an absolutely amazing job of storytelling through a nested series of stories. Each story is generally only a few pages long (the funniest of all, in my opinion, a scant couple of paragraphs in length), with its own name. These short tales make the book seem to fly by, as each storyteller meets others who tell their own stories.

The astounding thing is that each of these stories feels so very different, so vibrant, so alive. The characterization is strong and unique, the settings vivid enough to crackle off the page, the plots human and deeply compelling. Anyone who reads this book would surely love to call out to the stars from the snowy wastes of the polar bears, or to play the deadly serious game of Lo Shen under the towers of Al-a-Nur.

As if it were not enough to manage dozens of tales that are each as unique and compelling as the first, Valente has managed to do it without ever becoming muddled or confusing. Even when I was completely engrossed in a story-in-a-story-in-a-story-in-a-story, I could always remember the path that had led to that particular telling.

I think that in any story, there are things that we hope and fear will happen - that this character will show up again, that this theme will be explored more deeply. Valente did an excellent job of hitting those hoped-for notes, bringing up events that had been barely mentioned in earlier stories and re-examining them from an entirely different perspective.

And there were no weak threads in this tapestry. Every story was strong, lovable, absorbing, every character had me rooting for him or for her, every end was neatly tied with no knots or ugly shortcuts.

It's not often that I want to rave about books as much as I did this one. If you have any love in your heart for fairy tales, for fantasy, or simply for masterful writing, do not bypass this book. It's simply a must-buy, in my opinion.

"Now this child had a strange and wonderful birthmark, in that her eyelids and the flesh around her eyes was stained a deep indigo-black, like china pots filled with ink."

Catherynne M Valente's latest novel begins in the vast garden of a Sultan's palace and with a girl who has been banished from the palace into the garden because of a peculiar marking: her eyelids and the skin around her eyes are stained black. When a plucky boy approaches her, she tells him that the markings are stories written in tiny handwriting; and at his request she begins to tell him the first story, from the crease of her left eyelid. These stories are the focus of the book, although there is an important subplot of the boy getting in trouble for his growing association with the girl.

The stories she tells have a fairytale, mythical quality about them; there are stories within stories within stories, weaving in and out of each other; and it is all told in Valente's flowing, beautiful prose. She takes some basic archetypes - the prince, the maiden and the witch, for instance - and turns them on their head in an oft-peculiar way, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, with ideas drawn from a wide spread of cultures and a fair few from the imagination-rich world inside her own head.

This is a dazzling, original, interesting book, and I recommend it to everyone who wants a taste of something fresh and fantastic.

The orphan of the title reads from tales tattooed on her eyelids, and her strange appearance makes her an outcast from the sultan's palace. So she hides in the palace gardens, foraging for food, and deciphering the tales on her eyelids, until one day a boy from the palace approaches her and asks her to tell him one of her tales.

The tales she tells are labyrinthine, a series of interlocking stories within stories, as each new character encountered must tell their own tale, in their own words.

Through these tales, we find the threads which weave together to form something much greater, a world which contains a cosmology of a mare that fills the sky and stars who wander the earth; the tale of a necromancer who seeks out witches and magical creatures to steal their powers and to increase his own, and the tales of wronged women, who seek restitution and revenge. But, most of all, there are the tales of monsters who are far from monstrous, who are outcasts, yet who band together bothy out of need and out of a sense of camaraderie.

And throughout all these tales, there is the the act of telling, and the different voices of each story tell. But there is also, in the night garden, the tale of a girl with inked eyelids, and her growing friendship with the boy who is enthralled by the stories which she can tell.

This is a fabulous novel, in all senses of the word 'fabulous'. It draws me in and would not let me go until I have read through to the end. At which point I wanted more, but I must wait for the the second and final installment, which will not be available until late October. I am counting the days.