Review by Booklist Review
This collection of short stories showcases Valente's (Space Opera, 2018) gorgeous way with words and impressive genre flexibility as she moves from science fiction to fairy tale to comedic horror with her singular linguistic flair. There are three new stories, one of which is the magnificent Flame, Pearl, Mother, Autumn, Virgin, Sword, Kiss, Blood, Heart, and Grave, in which a girl is born with a stone tower for a torso. The collection closes with the heart-wrenching but hopeful tale with characters from her Fairyland series, The Beast Who Fought for Fairyland until the Very End, about narrative and war and hope. Elsewhere, we visit places as varied as the strange purgatory of No One Dies in Nowhere ; The Future Is Blue, a world where real land has disappeared; and, in Major Tom, orbital space. Fans of Valente will adore this collection for the same reasons they love her other work; for those unfamiliar, it provides an engrossing and appealing introduction to the many worlds and voices she is capable of producing.--Regina Schroeder Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this challenging collection of 15 reprints and originals with a variety of tones, themes, and styles, Valente's unique knack for bending genres and confounding the senses is on full display. Her approach is dreamlike, even hallucinatory, leaping from one idea to the next with dizzying frequency and skill. Her multilayered, complicated narratives require careful, in-depth reading to grasp their full meaning. In the title story, set on a drowned Earth, the last humans dwell on floating cities of garbage, forever holding out vain hope for dry land. "Two and Two Is Seven" gleefully plays with alliteration as it examines the lives of ancient machines resigned to life in a hidden valley. "Down and Out in R'lyeh" reads like a hybrid of H.P. Lovecraft, George Orwell, and Hunter S. Thompson as it asks just what the Elder Gods are waiting for. "Major Tom" focuses on the intersection of humanity and artificial intelligence. Even the most straightforward offerings are often beautiful and sometimes frustrating, and some, such as "The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild," are almost impenetrable in their surreal language and artistic construction. This collection is best suited for completists and devoted fans of Valente's short works. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Valente (Space Opera, 2018, etc.) collects her fablelike short works of fantasy, science fiction, and science fantasy.Several stories previously published as contributions to themed anthologies illustrate Valente's fearless experimentation in other authors' universes, including Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (a historic meeting between the muses for both Alice and Peter Pan), H.P. Lovecraft's Elder Gods (a group of surly Youngonly about 5,000 years old or soGods get tired of waiting for the apocalypse), and Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad (a community of unusual machines "live" in an isolated valley). There's also a really disturbing modern riff on the already unsettling fairy tale "The Girl Without Hands," in which the devil is represented by a drug dealer, as well as an amusing yet chilling entry for the Robots vs. Fairies anthology involving a rebellion against the humans that's launched at a WWE-style wrestling match between the programmatically restrained robots and the enslaved fae. These stories tend to be somewhat more plot-driven and easier to parse than some of Valente's originally sourced works, which are lovely but often inscrutable pieces, possessing their own mysterious dream logic. Their strength is in the images and moods they conjure up, although they occasionally border on the twee. It's perhaps inadvisable to seek literal meaning in a story about a young woman whose torso is a tower that serves as a shelter for an invading force. Most tales rely more on building a world than establishing a plot, such as the one where a man's consciousness is copied into a satellite guidance system or a world where conflict is settled by poison feasts rather than all-out war. Valente loves poetic language, and overanalysis would ruin what she's crafted here. Just how much substance there is in these soap bubbles, though, is perhaps difficult to assess.Let the stories wash over you and just go with it. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
