The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland — Review | Novel Sounds
There is a passage near the beginning of The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two — Catherynne M. Valente's third Fairyland novel, published in 2013 by Feiwel and Friends — where September, returning to Fairyland for the third time, is told that she has been away long enough to age visibly but that Fairyland itself has changed in ways that have nothing to do with her absence. The world has moved on without her. She is not, as she perhaps expected, stepping back into the story she left. She is stepping into a continuation of a story that kept going whether or not she was there to watch it.
This moment crystallizes what distinguishes the Fairyland series from the tradition it inherits. Lewis Carroll's Alice returns to Wonderland and finds it more or less as she left it — the same Queen, the same logic-defying rules, the same status quo available for subversion. L. Frank Baum's Oz is a place that waits. September's Fairyland does not wait. It changes. It accumulates history. The political situation is different each time she arrives. The people she knew have lived through things she missed. And September herself has grown — noticeably, irreversibly — in ways that Fairyland registers and that require her to renegotiate who she is in this world she loves.
To understand what Valente accomplishes in the third book, it is worth moving through the series from the beginning. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making was first published not as a printed book but as a free online serial, posted chapter by chapter on Valente's website beginning in January 2009. It was written during a period of financial difficulty — Valente was transparent about this in her online writing — and supported by readers through donations before it was completed. The serial attracted a substantial readership, and when Feiwel and Friends (a Macmillan imprint) acquired it for print publication, the book arrived in 2011 with an audience already in place. It became a New York Times bestseller and won the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2012.
The origin story is not merely biographical. It is part of the book's identity. Circumnavigated Fairyland was written into a community and shaped by that community's engagement, chapter by chapter, as it was being created. The relationship between the text and its first readers was more immediate and more collaborative than conventional publishing allows, and that quality of direct address — the narrator speaking to September, and through September to the reader, with an intimacy that feels personal — is embedded in the prose. The book addresses you. It knows you are there.
"September's Fairyland does not wait. It changes. It accumulates history. She must renegotiate who she is in a world she loves that has moved on without her."
— Novel Sounds editorialThe First Book: September Goes to Fairyland
September is twelve years old and living in Omaha, Nebraska when the Green Wind arrives on a Leopard and offers her a journey to Fairyland. She goes immediately — without hesitation, without saying goodbye properly, without fully understanding what she is agreeing to. This readiness is the first thing Valente establishes about September, and it is the quality that the series will both celebrate and complicate across five books. September is brave in the way of people who have not yet learned to be afraid of the right things.
Fairyland in the first book is ruled by the Marquess, a girl who came to Fairyland herself and did not leave when her time was up. The political situation is not benign: the Marquess has imposed restrictions that prevent many of Fairyland's creatures from using their magic freely. September's quest involves recovering a sword for a witch, and the complications that emerge from that quest drive the novel's structure. She acquires two companions: a Wyvern named A-Through-L (Ell, for short), who is the child of a library and a dragon and consequently knows everything that has ever been written down, and a Marid called Saturday, a boy made of ocean water. The three of them move through a Fairyland that is extraordinary in its invention.
What Valente achieves in the first book, and what establishes the series' emotional register, is the sense that Fairyland is genuinely wonderful and genuinely dangerous at the same time — not in the way of books where "danger" means obstacles that will clearly be overcome, but in the way of places where things are at stake that cannot be recovered once lost. September loses things in the first book. She makes choices whose costs she does not fully understand until after she has paid them. And the ending is not a simple triumph: it is a resolution that carries the weight of everything it required.
The Second Book: Beneath Fairyland
The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (2012, Feiwel and Friends) is the darkest of the five books, and in some ways the most formally daring. September returns to Fairyland to discover that a shadow world — Fairyland-Below — is draining Fairyland's magic. Her own shadow, taken from her in the first book, is now a ruler in the underworld: a version of herself that is wild and powerful and not accountable to September's conscience or values.
The confrontation between September and her shadow in the second book is one of the most searching pieces of psychological writing in the series. The shadow is not simply a villain. It is September without the things that constrain her — without the grief, the guilt, the carefulness that experience has imposed. The novel uses this split to ask what September would be if she had not learned what she has learned, and the answer is not comfortable. The shadow's appeal is real: she is more free. She gets to want things without apologizing for the wanting. The cost of that freedom is what the book is about.
The second book also introduces Fairyland-Below as a distinct world with its own geography, creatures, and politics — an expansion of the series' scope that prepares for the third book's move to the moon. Valente was systematically building a cosmology: above, below, and then, in the third novel, beyond.
The Third Book: The Moon and the Teenager
The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two is the book in which September's growth becomes the central subject rather than a backdrop condition. She is a teenager now. The word is used deliberately — Valente is precise about the significance of September's aging — and the novel uses the moon as a metaphor for the territory September has entered. The moon is a place of change, of phases, of cycles that are not under anyone's direct control. It is also a place with its own history and its own politics, a world that September arrives in without knowing the stakes.
The specific antagonist of the third book, and the threat that organizes the novel's plot, is a Yeti — a creature whose cold logic and enormous power represent, in the characteristic Valente manner, something more than a simple villain. The Yeti's worldview is not incomprehensible; it is a particular way of being in the world that is in conflict with September's, and the resolution of that conflict requires September to understand it, not merely to defeat it. This is consistently true of the series' antagonists: they are not villains in the sense of being simply wrong. They have positions. They have reasons. The difficulty of opposing them is partly the difficulty of holding your own values in the face of a coherent alternative.
The moon setting gives Valente room to explore questions about time and self that the series has been building toward. Fairyland changes between September's visits; the moon changes on a visible schedule, cycling through its phases in ways that affect everyone who lives there. September, who is between the child she was in the first book and the adult she will become, is herself in a kind of phase — not fixed, not stable, moving between states. The third book is the one in which the series most directly addresses what growing up takes from you rather than only what it gives you.
The Fourth and Fifth Books: A Boy and a Race
The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (2015, Feiwel and Friends) departs structurally from the preceding three novels by centering on a different protagonist: Hawthorn, a troll who is taken from Fairyland as a changeling and left in Chicago, where he grows up in a human family struggling to understand a world that does not fit him. The novel's Chicago sections are some of the most interesting writing in the series — Hawthorn's experience of the human world is estranging in ways that mirror September's experience of Fairyland, but from the inverse position, and Valente uses the parallel to articulate something about belonging and displacement that the September-focused books could not quite reach.
The fourth book also moves September's story forward in Fairyland, though she is not the protagonist. By the time readers return to her full story in The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home (2016, Feiwel and Friends), the series has accumulated enough history across five books that the finale carries genuine weight. September is now approaching adulthood. The question of whether she can stay in Fairyland — and what staying would mean, and what leaving would mean — is the emotional and narrative axis around which the last book turns.
Valente's Prose: The Style and Its Demands
The most distinguishing feature of the Fairyland series — and the feature most likely to determine whether a given reader connects with it or not — is Valente's prose style. Her sentences are long, subordinate-clause-rich, and built from an accumulation of images rather than a straightforward progression of information. The narrator addresses September directly at key moments, in the second person, in a register that is part fairy-tale teller and part intimate confidante: "You must know that September is not alone in this," the narrator might say, creating an address that includes both the protagonist and the reader simultaneously.
This style is demanding. It is also unlike almost everything else being published in middle grade or YA fiction, where clarity and pace are typically prioritized over syntactic complexity. Readers who find the style difficult to enter often cite the density as the obstacle; readers who find it accessible cite the same density as the primary pleasure. The style does something that simpler prose cannot: it creates the sensation of being inside a world that has more texture than you can take in at once, a world where attention is rewarded because there is always more to notice.
The allusions in the Fairyland series are numerous and drawn from an unusually wide range of traditions: Alice and Oz are the most obvious literary forebears, but Valente also draws on the Norse mythological tradition (Ell's nature as a Wyvern with library ancestry), Japanese mythology (the moon setting in the third book, including the name Tsukimi-ya), and the broader tradition of European fairy tale. These allusions are not decorative; they carry thematic weight. Readers who recognize them encounter the books on an additional level, but the books work without the recognition — the allusive texture is part of the prose experience even when its sources are not identified.
Re-Reading Across Ages
One of the things frequently said about the Fairyland series by its readers is that it reads differently at different ages. This is true of very few children's books — most work at one level or another, but not across decades of a reader's life. The Fairyland series appears to work at multiple ages because Valente did not write down to her audience: the emotional complexity, the thematic depth, and the prose difficulty are all present from the first page of the first book, and what changes as readers grow is not the book but the reader's capacity to take it all in.
A nine-year-old reading Circumnavigated Fairyland encounters an extraordinary adventure with a brave girl and magical creatures and a sequence of quests. A sixteen-year-old reading the same book encounters all of that plus the series' meditation on what it costs to want things, the ethics of quest and acquisition, and the specific pain of the ending's implications. An adult rereading the book encounters all of that plus the technical achievement of Valente's prose, the density of allusion, and the structural elegance of how the five books build on each other.
This is the standard set by Lewis Carroll, who wrote books that children could read and adults could not quite exhaust. Carroll's Wonderland is still generating critical and scholarly attention more than a century and a half after its first publication. It is too early to make that claim for Valente's Fairyland, but the series is built from the same understanding of what children's literature can attempt and what it cannot: that the attempt to limit a book's ambition to what a child can process is a misunderstanding of both children and books, and that the most lasting children's fiction has always trusted its readers — across all their ages — to find what they are ready to find.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Fairyland series is a five-book sequence following September, a girl from Omaha who visits a world called Fairyland multiple times across her childhood and teenage years. The books are known for exceptionally dense, allusive prose and for engaging seriously with the tradition of literary children's fantasy — Carroll, Baum, Tolkien — while creating something entirely original. The series spans 2011 to 2016 and is published by Feiwel and Friends (Macmillan).
The books in order are: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (2011), The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (2012), The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (2013), The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (2015), and The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home (2016). They should be read in order; each book builds on the previous ones and September ages across the sequence.
The third Fairyland novel sends a now-teenage September to the moon — a location called Tsukimi-ya in the novel's cosmology — where she must contend with a Yeti and the political complications of a world in lunar transition. The book addresses questions of identity and growing up: September is changing in ways that Fairyland registers, and the novel uses the moon's cycles as a metaphor for the phases of becoming that she is moving through.
Catherynne M. Valente is an American author known for stylistically ambitious, allusion-rich prose across adult fantasy, science fiction, and the Fairyland middle grade series. Her adult works include Deathless (2011), The Habitation of the Blessed (2010), and The Orphan's Tales duology (2006–2007). She has won Hugo and Locus Awards for her adult fiction. The Fairyland series' first volume won the Andre Norton Award in 2012.
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making was first published as a free online serial beginning in January 2009, posted chapter by chapter on Valente's website and supported by reader donations during a period of financial difficulty. The serial attracted a substantial readership before Feiwel and Friends acquired it for print publication in 2011, where it became a New York Times bestseller.
Valente's Fairyland consciously inherits the tradition of the girl taken to a strange world — Carroll's Alice books (1865, 1871) and Baum's Oz series (beginning 1900) — while departing from it significantly. Fairyland does not wait for September between visits: it changes, accumulates history, and moves on. September ages and grows. The books engage with their tradition through elaboration and complication rather than simple homage.
The series is technically classified as middle grade and can begin to be read from around age 9 or 10, though the prose density is higher than most middle grade. The books genuinely read differently at different ages: younger readers experience the adventure and wonder; older readers encounter the series' more complex engagements with identity, loss, and growing up. Adult readers frequently report finding new layers when they reread books they first encountered as children.
Valente's prose in the Fairyland series is dense, allusive, and formally distinctive. The sentences are long and subordinate-clause-rich; the narrator addresses September — and by extension, the reader — directly in the second person at key moments. The style is demanding relative to most middle grade and YA fiction but rewards rereading. Many readers cite the prose as the primary pleasure of the series rather than a barrier to it.
Deathless (2011, Tor Books) is Valente's adult fantasy novel drawing on the Russian folktale figure Koschei the Deathless, an immortal whose soul is hidden outside his body. Set in Soviet Leningrad across the twentieth century, it uses the folktale as a lens for the privation and endurance of the siege of Leningrad. It is considered one of Valente's most accomplished adult works and shares the mythological depth of the Fairyland series.
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making won the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2012, presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The series has appeared on numerous award shortlists and year-end lists. Valente has won Hugo and Locus Awards for her adult fiction, and the Fairyland books are regularly cited on lists of the best contemporary literary children's fantasy.
The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (2015) is the fourth book in the series and the one that departs most significantly from the September-centered structure of the first three. It follows Hawthorn, a troll taken from Fairyland as a changeling and raised in Chicago, navigating a human world that fits him imperfectly. The novel runs parallel to September's story in Fairyland and explores themes of belonging and displacement from an inverse angle — the creature who must learn a human world rather than a fantastic one.
The Fairyland series finds readers across age groups because Valente did not limit the books' ambition to what a child at a specific age can process. The adventure, the wonder, and the emotional immediacy work for younger readers; the thematic depth, stylistic complexity, and engagement with literary tradition work for older ones. The books grow with their readers — a quality shared by the literary children's classics they engage with and that distinguishes them from most contemporary children's publishing.