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|title=The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

|sort=Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, The

|publisher=Corsair

|date=January 2013

|website=http://catherynnemvalente.com

|video=QQNqCb_yVpw

|summary=Thirteen-year-old September at last manages to return to Fairyland, but she discovers that things are going badly there: magic is disappearing along with people's shadows. Once again she must gather her courage in both hands and set off on a quest.

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September has had various wonderful adventures in Fairyland already, and because she ate Fairy food she knows she will return. But a year has gone by without a word from her friends, and in the meantime she has become a teenager. This changes her, for it is the time when human children grow a heart, and when at last the summons comes, she finds her adventures are far more complex than they were before.

This is a far more subtle and nuanced approach to fairy tales, and it is hard to see how our heroine will reconcile all these diametrically opposed demands. Both parties want freedom and happiness, and both, surely, have rights. And the shadow characters, while at times self-centred and greedy, can also be as loving and kindly as their other halves in the world above. Furthermore, the whole story is shot through with a hint of possible sorrow and tragedy awaiting September when (that is to say, if) she returns to the ordinary, non-magical world. It is a darker, more grow-up story with no guarantee of happy ever after. There are echoes of Alice in Wonderland, with odd, unsettling characters who allow traces of cruelty, greed and self-indulgence to peek out from beneath their apparent bonhomie, along with a generous dollop of charming and heart-warming nonsense. And like that book, it is well worth the time and effort a careful, patient and attentive reader will put into reading it. It is delightful, original, funny and scary — and at times it is also a little strange. Isn't that what a fairy tale should be?

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