Alex Sarll's Reviews > The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

Having left us on a terrible cliffhanger in The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland..., Valente teasingly ignores it altogether, or at least affects to do so ("Fairyland is like that sometimes. It just...doesn't play nice."), and introduces us to someone else altogether. In place of young September, snatched away from Omaha to Fairyland, here is Hawthorn, an infant troll taken from Fairyland and brought as a changeling to Chicago, where he's perpetually baffled and disappointed by the world's strange rules, by the way things like lights and desks don't reply when you talk to them, by the sense that he ought to be far bigger and grander than a mere human boy. Obviously, you could consider this a fine metaphor for the experience of any human child who has ever felt themselves to be Not Normal; it works very well as such, but I think I prefer to follow Mike Carey's Lucifer and say no, this is the thing for which childhood alienation is a metaphor. Even when she's seemingly stranded herself in our mute and maddening world, Valente's intoxicating prose conjures something far stranger and truer than reality, something which will ring true for anyone who ever wanted "to tear around the house hollering: "WOMBAT! WOMBAT! ONLY WOMBATS! I AM THE WOMBAT PRINCE OF CHICAGO!"" And I would be suspicious of anyone who has not.
Inevitably, our conspiratorial narrator does eventually lead us back to Fairyland, which once again is not quite as expected; and yes, we do find out what became of September, but only in order to be left on a tenterhook even more suspenseful than the last one. But we forgive, for while we wait for the concluding volume there are sentences here which will survive being turned over and over in the memory, showing a shiny new facet each time.