“A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it it has been taught to sit up or lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarms, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay. But the trick most folks are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they’ve got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don’t have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted. Shall I give fair warning, as neither you nor I was given?”
In the first book, The Green Wind whisks September to Fairyland. In the second, September visits Fairyland’s underworld. In this third book, the war is almost over, September has turned fourteen, and she worries that she’s too old to travel to Fairyland, despite the promises that she’ll return. But despite her new almost-grown-up-ness, the haughty Blue Wind does show up and takes September–and her neighbor’s Model A–to Fairyland’s moon. There, she’s given an Official Profession, and a small locked casket to take to the city of Almanac, and reunites with her old friends the Wyverary and Saturday the Marid to find a mysterious Yeti, who is apparently the cause of terrifying moonquakes.
As in the first two books, Valente’s world-building is beautiful. The cast of characters and descriptions of Fairyland are explosions of imagination. The narrator has sympathetic and clever asides to us, the readers, throughout, the moon’s residents are odd and charming, and I found the resolution of the plot deeply satisfying.
However, it takes rather a long time for our plucky heroine to become aware of her purpose in Fairyland this time around. Of the three books, this is the one where she is a spectator more often than an actor, although she does have moments of bravery and action. We sit with September through lots of lectures from the imaginative cast of characters, from a crocodile expounding on the nature of money to a dapper tiger telling everyone about the viewer’s relationship to/with the image. Smart stuff, yes, but I wish September had discovered these lessons on her own rather than sitting in her Model A listening to others wax philosophical. There were also a few sections where I had to slow down to figure out what was going on in the setting because the prose was very pretty but I wasn’t sure what was actually happening. Compared to the first two books, this was a little disappointing, because September has been so non-passive til now.
I can forgive this though, because by this point in the series, I’m invested–in the characters, the wordsmithing, and the clever and empowering morals of the stories, and the sly omniscient narrator. For September, the real quest here is, as you might guess, nothing to do with Yetis and everything to do with herself : her (future romantic?) relationship with the non-linear Saturday; her calling and profession in life; the nature of fate and possibility; what it really means to grow up. September is growing up and her lessons are getting harder, so this book darker than the other two–starting from the very beginning, when the wind who sweeps her away is not the kind, boisterous Green Wind, but the cruel, sly Blue Wind.
This book ends on a cliffhanger, sort of, but I still found it satisfying as a stand-alone read. I hope that the next installment, due out in the Spring, gives September a little more action and agency–I can’t wait to see where she and her friends end up!
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