I think this was my favorite book in the series so far. There are so many wonderful, beautiful truths in the pages. September's growing up, and things are getting complicated, and there's talk here of fate and choosing, and making of life what you will, and bucking trends. All wrapped up in Cathe...
Un racconto che ha il sapore delle filastrocche!Quando ho iniziato a leggere questo racconto ho arricciato il naso e ho pensato "che modo bislacco di scrivere" e immagino che sia stato un pensiero comune. Ma poi ho ricominciato e ho affrontato la lettura con mente aperta, riscoprendo una narrazio...
I was between books and needed a little something. Like a scoop of sorbet between courses. This was utterly perfect. Quick. Beautiful. Charming. Lovely. Magic. It made me feel like I was 7 or 8 and sitting on the carpeted floor of the school library, listening to a story.... Yet it resonated...
Love, love, love Catherynne M. Valente. My 10 year old daughter and I read "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Boat of Here Own Making" last year and loved it! Intelligent, funny, marvelously well written. This is a short-story prequel about how Queen Mallory became Queen Mallory. ("F...
Her whole body shook with the need to go, go, go, run, faster, get ahead of the pack, find a shortcut, pound the road. The Marid looked up and down the Barleybroom for a ferry, for the other racers, for anything the catapult might have dropped. But the scrap-yarn wombat was in no such hurry. Blun...
He has a name but it doesn’t matter. He has a job. That’s who he is. He’s a Pinkerton, but that doesn’t matter either. Who isn’t, these days? If you’ve got a gun arm on you, that is. If you’ve got a proclivity for hitting people until they do as they’re told. This dude, he come out from Chicago w...
The air had sharpened, swallows sang down the sun.“Is this the dream of the Fox? Or the dream of the Fifth Floor?” I asked.“In all probability. I have no revelations for you, only the peace that comes with understanding. You did not strive to reach the top of the pagoda—you fled to the pinnacle w...
YOU’VE been waiting all this time. I know. I know you. I said there was a basement right there in the beginning and you been waiting for me to get there, drumming your fingers and peeking over the pages for a little peek at something dark. Trying to see round the curtain at my little peep show be...
Tamburlaine, Blunderbuss, Scratch: three. Plus himself made four. Four at most. But through his bleary, thousand-ton sleep—for trolls sleep the sleep of stones, and cannot be roused quickly nor safely without serious technical equipment—he counted four lumpy, blurry, splotchy shapes round the col...
A demand to shut the damn thing off has been made and ignored, but the cloth makes Clara look benign. Shapes move indistinctly across the room. SEVERIN UNCK, sixteen years old, sits in silhouette, her hair longer than it will ever be again.] PERCIVAL UNCK It’s for your own good, my little hippopo...
In the grottoes, near the propellers rusted over with moss like verdigris, you might hear someone say otherwise. Crowded around an old gasoline barrel boiling up grey shrimp in oil-slicked water. You might hear someone say anything. Any sophisticated soul can sieve out such obvious lies. The shri...
Tell me a story about yourself. There are many stories about me. Do you recognize this one? A good and honest family lived on the edge of a dark wood. They milked their cows and wove their cloth and their children grew tall a...
In that house, a wide and lovely place where all is arranged just so, the world that you and I know, the world which contains Omaha and Zimbabwe and strawberry ice cream and horses with spotted rumps and Ferris wheels and wars in Europe, would be the front parlor. The first thing you see when you...
I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood-fires burn at night so that eve...