In the Night Garden (The Orphan's Tales, #1)

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In the Night Garden (The Orphan's Tales #1)

by Catherynne M. Valente (Goodreads Author)

4.2 of 5 stars 4.20 · rating details · 2,164 ratings · 381 reviews

A Book of Wonders for Grown-Up Readers

Every once in a great while a book comes along that reminds us of the magic spell that stories can cast over us to dazzle, entertain, and enlighten. Welcome to the Arabian Nights for our time a lush and fantastical epic guaranteed to spirit you away from the very first page.

Secreted away in a garden, a lonely girl spins stories to warm...more

Paperback, 483 pages

Published October 31st 2006 by Spectra (first published October 28th 2006)

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Dec 05, 2011 Kay rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, journey-not-destination, myths-and-tales, poetry-in-motion

Tales within tales within tales, all woven together like a magical, colorful tapestry depicting griffins, dead moon walkers, beastly princesses, princely beasts, pirate saints, Stars, snake gods, and so much more, all written in dark ink around the eyes of a little girl. Reading Valente's prose is like dreaming; during the act, you understand everything and think you see the truth, but when jerked back into reality, the stories fade together into a colorful, abstract image. It's pretty and meani...more Tales within tales within tales, all woven together like a magical, colorful tapestry depicting griffins, dead moon walkers, beastly princesses, princely beasts, pirate saints, Stars, snake gods, and so much more, all written in dark ink around the eyes of a little girl. Reading Valente's prose is like dreaming; during the act, you understand everything and think you see the truth, but when jerked back into reality, the stories fade together into a colorful, abstract image. It's pretty and meaningful, but you can't quite explain the story behind the image as well as you would like to.

The book begins with a lonely little girl who lives in the palace gardens. A prince, curious and slightly afraid, meets the little girl, and soon after the two bond in a tender friendship punctuated by midnight meetings in which the girl spins her tales. The tales she spins are myths of creation, journeys, religion, death, and life, but not as we have heard before. Some of the myths are dark, involving death and violation, but others are whimsical and yearning. A number of fantastical creatures inhabit the pages, all interacting in some way or another, as if existing on a great web. They are spread apart along the plane of the web, but somehow, they are all directly or indirectly connected in this big tapestry of life.

In the Night Garden is one of the most unique books that I've read in a long time; it's a book that you read for the stories and the prose, a book in which to meander, not a plot-dominated book that keeps you up at night with non-stop action. Valente's writing is flowery and imaginative, but purposeful. She chooses her words carefully and does not write for the sake of putting words down on paper. It takes a while to get used to the flow and rhythm of her prose, but once you do, you lose yourself in her words and stories, just like the little prince who loses himself in the girl's tales.

Sometimes, the tales within tales within tales got confusing, and I lost track of where I was. I was tempted to even make a little map of what happens. But I think that while the book is composed of stories, the stories come together to result in the symphony. Would you attend a symphony orchestra to listen to just the violins or the cellos? Would you try to isolate each section, analyze the single instrument's contribution to the overall whole? Some may, but in doing so, we sacrifice the final symphony for just one instrument. No, we listen for the finished product, to rejoice in how so many different components come together to create beautiful music. That is how this book should be read, as a symphony of well crafted tales that create a more beautiful whole. Approach the book with patience and an open mind. It will all come together in the end as something lovely and unique, I promise.(less)

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Jan 29, 2013 mark monday rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: alpha-team, mythopoeikon, fantastickal

Tales within tales, tales out of space, tales that spring from stars that fall from sky to take human shape; the writer writes like the dreamer dreams dreams - some dreams yearning and romantic, others dark and tragic, each dream holding a little bit of the next dream in its heart: the story as Oriental Ouroboros: the Arabian Nights as template, as both starting point and point of resolution; themes and metaphors and symbols slowly surfacing, to disappear and then reappear again, transformed, re...more

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Mar 01, 2008 Grace rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone

Shelves: favorite-books-ever

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture," or so the old quote says. I can't help but remember this saying as I attempt to write down some of my fragmented, all too feeble thoughts regarding Catherynne Valente's masterwork, The Orphan Tales: In the Night Garden and In the Cities of Coin and Spice. To start out with a bang, I have to tell you what my reaction was upon completing the last page of the second book. It was 1am, and I set the book down, after having to re-read one of th...more "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture," or so the old quote says. I can't help but remember this saying as I attempt to write down some of my fragmented, all too feeble thoughts regarding Catherynne Valente's masterwork, The Orphan Tales: In the Night Garden and In the Cities of Coin and Spice. To start out with a bang, I have to tell you what my reaction was upon completing the last page of the second book. It was 1am, and I set the book down, after having to re-read one of the pivotal revelations on the last page and say "ohhh...I SEE." I turned the light out, lay down in bed, and started crying. And I don't just mean a few pinpricks from my eyes like I've had happen for a handful of tales over the years. I mean nose-sniffling, shoulder-shaking crying. I cried and I shook my head as I cried, laughing at myself for reacting more strongly than I had to any book I'd ever read. I cried because the books were done. I cried because the ending was so incredible. I cried because I was in awe of Catherynne Valente, only one year older than me, and having given something to the world of myth and story and imagination that I feel should go into the same column (and high in that column) as the greatest contributors of all time. How can one person have so much inside? And be able to get it all out onto the page?

This book is not an easy read. Let me tell you that straight-out as well. Many people have written reviews saying "I couldn't keep track of the stories" or "the format was too distracting, with the nested stories." I also found this to be true the first time I read the first book. I got to a little over page 100, and returned it to the library. But Valente's name kept cropping up...first on Endicott Studios, featuring an incredible short story I loved, then on Jen Parrish's website, as she created a gorgeous necklace in the shape of a boat with red sails for an auction. I sought out more of Cat's short stories, and I was blown away by every single one. Finally I decided to try the book again, settling down with it at the start of winter, when the fire crackled in my fireplace, and the stories folded around me like blankets against the snow. I approached it with more patience, and gave it time, rather than trying to rush through it. And I discovered that this book was not only good...it was the most imaginative, fully-formed, genius, and moving work of literature I'll most likely ever read.

If I seem to be overly prosaic and prone to hyperbole about this book, (I should say books, since it's a duology, but the two volumes fit together like one work) it's just a symptom of how much it has crept into every fiber of me. I now want to write extra stories about descendants of her tales. I want to create art showing the pivotal moments in the stories that I adored.

The message of the books is both simple and incredibly complex. The tales themselves are both an intricate symphony, and a simple thread that weaves around to end at a simple resolution. Valente is the Weaver of these tales, closing her eyes, grabbing all that is around her, and remaking it into beautiful gowns, girls, and cities, knowing all the while where the tales will end, whether that end is happy or sad.

A side note: I read a review on here saying that the reader didn't understand why Valente received the Tiptree Award, since her book only featured female protagonists, and didn't seem to make any new contributions to feminism. I cannot imagine that this reader read the same book that I did. The feminism carried through in every tale in a tale in a tale. Valente took every mythic archetype, every trope, and turned it on its head, making you think to yourself "well why DO I always assume a Selkie is a woman, or that a Satyr is a man? Why DID I presume that the sailor who stole Sigrid from her home had to be a man? And why can't daughters grow up to be warriors, and sons grow up to be beautiful?"

(less)

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Jun 02, 2008 Nicole rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy

The tales told to the young Prince come from the tattoos inked on the skin of a young woman. These same strange tattoos that are keeping her isolated from the rest of the sultan's household, make her seem fascinating to the prince. Each night he sneaks out to meet with her in the Sultan's gardens.

This book is two series of interwoven, short, personal tales told from the tattoos. Tales that ultimately braid together. Like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales there is a series of people's pilgrimages told i...more The tales told to the young Prince come from the tattoos inked on the skin of a young woman. These same strange tattoos that are keeping her isolated from the rest of the sultan's household, make her seem fascinating to the prince. Each night he sneaks out to meet with her in the Sultan's gardens.

This book is two series of interwoven, short, personal tales told from the tattoos. Tales that ultimately braid together. Like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales there is a series of people's pilgrimages told in first person. The stories are intermittent and interspersed but linear despite their interrupted telling. Although the stories are being related in first person by various people they are really told that way by one girl to one boy. He is escaping to bright visions of the larger world adults live in. She is seeking acceptance in any world.
I began reading this book and immediately was repelled by the awkward and repeated use of overwrought similes. Every thing is like something else, this is arresting and distracts from the flow. The first few tales continued in this fashion but then the descriptive style became more varied and less self consciously dramatic. My least favorite description that irks me still was "desultory eyes". How do a pair of eyes lack consistency do they move disjointedly? The only way I could conceive of this fitting is if they wandered in differing directions with disconnected focus but this did not seem to be the point being made in the context.
I kept thinking I would put this book down but I found myself drawn back to the complexity of the telling even if I did skim passages as soon as they threatened an excess of difficult descriptions.
This book missed being very good by an excessive verbosity and awkward English but despite this the story's contents are worth the time to read. Her creatures were not just relating good stories but also help us look at normal behavior and why it is desirable or not. How any individual's goals could influence disparate lives.
I will read the sequel to see where this author goes with her ingenious, metaphorical monsters and her various humans. (less)

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Aug 20, 2012 Anne Toronto1 rated it 1 of 5 stars

"In the Garden" lives an almost woman abandoned as a toddler when an inky mask appeared across her eyes. Catherynne M. (Why? Are not middle initials customarily to distinguish common names?) Valente writes like a computer programmed to arbitrarily join a list of adjectives with nouns, and randomly extract one role as narrator to generate a new not-story.

Long lasting tales crossing cultures speak to basic eternal human emotions and conflicts. Soap operas are the most popular longest running show...more

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Apr 16, 2009 Kat Hooper rated it 5 of 5 stars

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

I haven't read any fantasy quite like Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales duology. This is the story of a young orphan girl who is shunned because of the dark smudges that appeared on her eyelids when she was a baby. She lives alone in a sultan's garden because people think she's a demon and nobody will claim her. However, one of the young sons of the sultan, a curious fellow, finds her in the garden and asks her about her dark eyes. She explains th...more ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

I haven't read any fantasy quite like Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales duology. This is the story of a young orphan girl who is shunned because of the dark smudges that appeared on her eyelids when she was a baby. She lives alone in a sultan's garden because people think she's a demon and nobody will claim her. However, one of the young sons of the sultan, a curious fellow, finds her in the garden and asks her about her dark eyes. She explains that there are wonderful stories written on her eyelids and that a spirit has told her she must read and tell the stories; Then the spirit will return and judge her. The prince loves stories, he begs her to tell him one, and so she begins.

The rest of In the Night Garden and its sequel In the Cities of Coin and Spice is a collection of nested stories that are interspersed with short interactions between the young prince and the girl with the dark eyes (somewhat like The Arabian Nights). These stories are all connected to each other, but each is unique and highly imaginative. There are fascinating creatures--many based on myths and fairy tales--like a monopod, two griffins, a necromancer, a wicked papess, an otter king, a woman with three breasts, three brothers with dog heads who become accidental cannibals, a leucrotta, a Magyr, a skin seller, living stars fallen to earth . . . and these are just some of those that I can describe in a few words (and I'm not giving them justice). The characters in The Orphan's Tales remind me of the Cantina Scene in Star Wars. The darker characters, (e.g., the wizard and the necromancer), are particularly excellent. Ms Valente's imagination for bizzarre characters and plots exceeds Lewis Carroll's and she never lets up. Each story is brilliant and brilliantly told.

And the prose is truly beautiful:

"He was very tall, and thin as a length of paper. His skin and cloaks were the color of the moon--not the romantic lover's moon, but the true lunar geography I had heard whispered by Sun-and-Moon Nurians come to buy glass for their strange sky-spying tools: gray and pockmarked, full of secret craters, frigid peaks, and blasted expanses. His eyes had no color in them save for a pinpoint pupil like a spindle's wound--the rest was pure, milky white. He passed three solid gold pieces over my mother's palm, and she shuddered in revulsion at his touch when the money changed hands. She handed me over eagerly, examining the coins like a fat pig snuffling at its supper slop."

"My mother had kept silent as a nun since the day my sister was taken from her. I was an infant when she vanished from us; I never knew that sister. But her absence stalked the house like a hungry dog. The hole where she had been took up space at our dinner table, it sagged and slumped in the musty air, it ate and drank and breathed down all of our necks. . . I grew up alone in that silent house with nothing but the stinking cows and my mute mother and the hole. Even my father didn't want to spend his days there; he stayed in the fields directing hay-rolling and goat-breeding until it was dark enough to slip back inside the house without anyone bothering him. But still, the hole answered the bell when he rang, and he had to scurry to bed with his head down to avoid looking it in the eye."

There are many more of these gorgeous passages to enjoy. My only complaint about the writing itself is that there are dozens of characters in The Orphan's Tales and they ALL talk like that. So, it's not very realistic, but I suppose realism wasn't exactly what Ms Valente, as a poet, was going for.

One other small complaint I have is that because the stories of The Orphan's Tales seem at first to be random and unrelated, it's hard to feel deeply involved with many of the characters because they don't stick around for long (except for the orphan and the sultan's son who don't do much but talk and listen). But, again, that's the point, because we learn at the end of In the Cities of Coin and Spice that all of the strange stories and characters actually contribute to, and explain, the history of the orphan girl. Perhaps that's a bit of a spoiler, but you'll enjoy the stories more if you realize that it's all going somewhere. And, besides, you're a clever reader, and you'll probably figure out that there's got to be something going on here besides just a bunch of beautifully-written, highly imaginative, unconnected stories.

But, the main reason I'm telling you this is because I know you'll get more out of your reading if you follow the advice I'm going to give you... Just trust me: Get yourself a pencil, a pad of paper, and a fine cup of caffeinated coffee (in my experience, a Starbucks Venti Latte works best). Sit down with In the Night Garden and read the first few pages up to the point where the girl starts to tell "the first tale I was able to read, from the crease of my left eyelid." This first story is about Prince Leander. Write "Prince Leander" at the bottom of your paper. Prince Leander runs into a gray-haired tattooed "crone" and a few pages later, she starts to tell her story. Write "crone," or whatever you want to call her, above Prince Leander's name. Soon, "crone" starts telling the story that her grandmother told her. Write "crone's grandmother" above her name. (I've got a picture of my own notes at Fantasy Literature ) This is not the kind of book you can leave for a few days and come back to unless you have notes to tell you who was talking to who. Or unless you're a lot smarter than me ... which is certainly possible.

Highly recommended for the reader who appreciates beautiful prose, is willing to take notes, and is looking for something original.

Read more Catherynne Valente book reviews at Fantasy Literature (less)

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Mar 01, 2009 Susan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fairy_tales, fantasy

This has taken forever for me to finish. I just didn't want to go back to it. The first part is beautifully written, but her prose feels very effortful, as if all the beauty had to be hammered out, line by line, and she wants you to see each stroke. It finally picked up, but the interconnecting stories create a jumbled mess of a plot, not at all helped by the fact that many characters live for centuries, therefore making a general timeline almost impossible to put together. Very prettily describ...more

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Oct 28, 2007 Res rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sff, tiptree_award

The one with the stories within stories within stories, many of them centering around a maiden who's been transformed into a monster.

I found the Arabian Nights-style format confusing and distracting a lot of the time (despite the helpful chapter titles: The Tale of the Prince and the Goose, Concluded), but in the end, as characters reappeared in new contexts, I began to see how the structure allowed for a more textured and interesting book.

I don't understand the Tiptree Award falling on this bo...more

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Apr 08, 2009 Emilie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: mythic-fiction, endicott, 09

The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden articulates many ways that identity is constructed, and specifically the identity of the outsider/the other.
I am really drawn in by this theme of beasts/monstrousness/people who have experience outside of the "normal"- and the loneliness and isolation they experience. The motif of otherness is explored through witnessing many characters journey through their isolation and pain to reclamation and rebirth-finding connection to their selves and to others-and...more

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Apr 19, 2008 Izlinda rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy-fairy-tales-mythology

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. A girl lives in the garden of a Sultan and is seen by others to be a demon, because she has dark eyelids and surrounding areas. However, as we find out when a boy stumbles upon her, they are really minutely tattooed stories. She relieves them night by night to this noble boy, and each story is interwoven within others much like how Scheherazade spun her tales, about monsters, creatures, Stars (we might use the term "Gods" and "Goddesses" instead, though these are not like the ones we have in ou...more

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Aug 07, 2007 Wealhtheow rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy

Stories are told within stories, moving ever inward (or outward), echoing each others themes and characters. A very imaginative take on what it means to be a fantasy archetype--a maiden, a monster, a captain, a witch. Each tells their own story, and the characters in the story tell *their* own story, and so on. Because there's no prolonged narrative tension, nor any one character in every story, the book lost my interest a few times. I'm glad I perservered, because for every lackluster tale ther...more

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Dec 08, 2011 Frank S rated it 4 of 5 stars

Valente certainly has a way about her words. I love her writing style. I really enjoyed the book but I have to say I found certain portions difficult to get through. Not because the writing was bad or even the stories weren't interesting. It was because of the fragmentation of the stories through the nesting. You'd get really into one story just to be ripped away into another. Sometimes by the time you got back to the main line you'd forgotten where you were. [return]I enjoyed both the books, bu...more

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Jan 24, 2009 Jeff rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, fiction

This is a lovely book of fairy tale(s) set in an interesting frame narrative. I don't want to say too much for fear of spoilers, but I was very struck with the way that all the stories blended into each other, as though the Arabian Nights (its obvious and overwhelming influence) were layered like an onion, instead of serial like a pod full of peas.

The book deals with broad fairy-tale-revisionist/feminist themes, such as the nature of heroism, the magic power of the non-beautiful and even the mon...more

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Feb 06, 2013 Debeehr rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, fiction, heroine, fairy-tales

(This is a review for the duology as a whole.)

Easily some of the best fantasy I've read in a long time. It's been a while since I've found a multivolume work so compelling that I've felt the urge to continue on after I finished the first, but I did with this one. This series is strikingly different from the "hero goes on a quest" traditional fantasy format, and from the political-intrigue novels that comprise so much fantasy today. This duology instead is in the vein of the "Arabian Nights": it...more

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Mar 04, 2012 Christal rated it 4 of 5 stars

Finally finished this!! I actually wound up really liking it even though it took me a while to get through. Told in the style of the Arabian Nights, an orphan girl who is considered a 'demon' by the kingdom she lives in for her eyelids -- black from the stories that were tattooed to them in black ink -- befriends one of the princes and woos him to her side night after night with the stories that a darken her eyes.

These are stories within stories within stories. I think they eventually get in 4 d...more

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Dec 24, 2011 Suzanne rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: started-but-did-not-finish, fantasy

I may go back to this book -- or I may not. As so many have noted, it is not a work you can pick up when you have a few minutes to read, and I simply don't have the hours to devote to reading it straight through. Although, frankly, I can't imagine doing that, either.

I can understand why so many rate it so highly, but -- the word "pretentious" keeps coming to mind. As well as "convoluted" and "needlessly complicated." Valente is clearly in love with language and words; her writing is deep and lay...more

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Jun 04, 2011 Jdaniels rated it 5 of 5 stars

This has to be one of the best books I've read in a very long time.

"In the Night Garden" is set up like the Arabian Nights - stories within stories. The outer framework involves a young girl telling these stories to one of the sultan's young sons. She begins a story ... and that character runs into a character who tells a story ... and in that story the character runs into a character who tells a story ... etc. I think at one point I figured out it went 9 stories deep from the outer framework.

It...more This has to be one of the best books I've read in a very long time.

"In the Night Garden" is set up like the Arabian Nights - stories within stories. The outer framework involves a young girl telling these stories to one of the sultan's young sons. She begins a story ... and that character runs into a character who tells a story ... and in that story the character runs into a character who tells a story ... etc. I think at one point I figured out it went 9 stories deep from the outer framework.

It sounds confusing, I know. But Valente does a surprisingly good job of keeping everything organized so the reader doesn't get confused. In various parts of the stories, the storyteller "comes up for air" so to speak, popping up into one of the previous tellings to remind the reader exactly which story he is in.

That in itself would make this an excellent book. But there is so much more!

Every single one of the stories are connected. At first it may be a little difficult to get into the stories, primarily because the plot is consistently interrupted with another story, and none of them seem related. But once you get toward the middle and start working your way out of the stories - slowly climbing to the top - all the pieces come together, and although good stories separately, they combine to form another story, with each story a piece of a puzzle, put together to show the whole picture. And that is where I was left in awe of Valente's skill.

And the stories? They are rooted in the style of old folklore and fables - and some of them can be quite dark. The style if of the old fairy tales - before Disney - when the tales were just as likely to have an ending of death and failure as opposed to happy ever afters. And yet all these tales are original. These are not old stories retold, but new stories told in an old way.

I would heartily recommend this book to just about anyone. I got this from the library, but you can be sure that it is going on my wishlist, and I can hardly wait to get my hands on the next book in the series. (less)

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May 23, 2011 Deanna Knippling rated it 5 of 5 stars

Normally, when I pass out five-star reviews, it's because I like a thing so much that I can't think rationally about it.

Not so here.

The beginning of the book really annoyed me, as a matter of fact, because it hit what were for me several false notes. Fortunately, I was reading in bed and didn't feel like getting up to get a new book, and pushed past them.

This is a book that took a while to pay off for me, but once it started to do so, it payed off in a big way. Because the book is a set of inte...more

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Feb 08, 2011 Arachne8x rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, e-book

This book is probably like One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, but I've never read the book (it's next on my list). The framing story is of an orphan girl who has stories written on her eyelids. She reads the stories to a young boy who comes to visit her.

The stories are fantastical and fascinating. In some cases they are quite dark. This is definitely not a book for young children and I'd advise the parents of older children to read it before recommending it to their kids.

What's neat about the...more

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Oct 09, 2010 Kathleen rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Orphan’s Tales is seriously ambitious – ‘the Arabian Nights for our time’ according to the blurbs. The book combines myriad individual stories with an over-arching plot fit for an epic novel of the world’s creation, fallen stars, journeys across oceans and through dangerous cities, and one girl’s discovery of her true identity.

Not only does Catherynne Valente revel in great story-telling, she remakes ancient myths and fairy tales to express bold, modern ideas. This is a feminist re-imaginin...more The Orphan’s Tales is seriously ambitious – ‘the Arabian Nights for our time’ according to the blurbs. The book combines myriad individual stories with an over-arching plot fit for an epic novel of the world’s creation, fallen stars, journeys across oceans and through dangerous cities, and one girl’s discovery of her true identity.

Not only does Catherynne Valente revel in great story-telling, she remakes ancient myths and fairy tales to express bold, modern ideas. This is a feminist re-imagining of the heroes, heroines and monsters we all grew up hearing and reading about, and Valente’s sympathies are always with the outcasts. To take a simple example, a maiden trapped in a tower with her abundant golden hair turns out to be dragon-winged and deer-legged. No Prince will rescue her, but a Witch finds her a perfect place in a pirate ship full of monsters.

The stories are nested one inside another, so a prince setting out on a quest will encounter an old woman who tells her story, in which she encounters a wolf who tells hers and so on. Some tales fill just one chapter, others spill over into many. It’s a real feat of writing that the stories stay clear and memorable, but also that Valente maintains the tension and suspense while growing so many plots. Overall, I found the books beautiful, serious and enjoyable at the same time.

For me the first volume, In the Night Garden, was fresher and more exciting than the second, In the Cities of Coin and Spice, although the two wrap up together well. My main problem with the second was that there were some very disturbing scenes of cruelty to children. Valente is drawing on a tradition of fairy stories dependent upon mistreated and abandoned orphans so I understand why she wrote these things, but they were hard to read. Also, I started to feel the lack of strong male characters in this book, but that’s a very minor complaint. The books are challenging, but they’re also very special, a unique voyage for the imagination. (less)

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Apr 12, 2010 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars

This really is a beautifully written book. It's a story within a story within a story kind of book. Because of that, some people might get frustrated by a lack of action, essentially everything is being told to you and so everything is in the past tense. But the characters are wonderful, they are well written with pasts, and regrets and wants and desires that they will tell you through a tale. And the tales are intertwinning, with characters from one tale encountering characters from another tal...more

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Dec 30, 2009 Jessica rated it 5 of 5 stars

Five stars--not because the book is without flaws but because I think the uniqueness of its strengths makes up for its deficiencies. This isn't the most pleasant reading experience I've ever had. No doubt the responsibility for this is shared between the author's quirks and mine. I felt the prose was a bit (and sometimes significantly more than a bit) overworked. I know it's the sort of poetic, native-sounding style the author was going for, but I find it unpleasant to be suffocated by great hea...more Five stars--not because the book is without flaws but because I think the uniqueness of its strengths makes up for its deficiencies. This isn't the most pleasant reading experience I've ever had. No doubt the responsibility for this is shared between the author's quirks and mine. I felt the prose was a bit (and sometimes significantly more than a bit) overworked. I know it's the sort of poetic, native-sounding style the author was going for, but I find it unpleasant to be suffocated by great heaping piles of metaphor and simile. (Do you see how tight I am with irony? Yeah, we be buds). It's artistic perhaps, but also distracting. I also found it difficult to adjust to the pointlessness of the story. Not that the book wasn't pointy. In one sense, it had many points. It was multi-pronged, multi-layered, with threads that zigged, zagged, dangled and interconnected. But as far as having a beginning, middle and end, a question, a volta and a conclusion or a climax of any sort, well...it's not that type of story. The book is littered with characters who all get to tell their own stories (but very few get to actually finish them) and some of them (but not all) are sort of loosely related to the others. I don't have the sort of attention span that handles digressions well, and the multiple framing narratives with stories within stories within stories left me feeling itchy and claustrophobic. It reads kind of like a maze with a ton of loops and sharp turns and doubling back and dead ends.

So why the five stars? Because the "In the Night Garden" is special. And I write that with no sarcasm. In a way the novel is a re-envisioning of fairy tales. It turns the maiden/monster dichotomy on its head and celebrates the power and value of monstrous women. I have often bemoaned that women as a gender have a stunted and anemic literary history (to say nothing of our actual history). While boys look to cowboys, soldiers, firefighters and astronauts for role models, little girls are taught to be princesses. And this isn't a terrible thing, but the models for princessy behavior tend to sit in towers waiting for princes to rescue them while accomplishing absolutely nothing for themselves. In contrast, this book turns an admiring eye toward the witches and freaks, the stepmothers and misshapen hags--the kind of women who change the course of fairy tales. The novel presents them in all of their sharp complexity, deftly weaving their stories together until the overarching theme I was left with was one of female empowerment. The women in the story were strong, smart, selfish and generous, beautiful and horrifying, kind and cruel. They had important interests, beyond beauty and boys, and as a result, they were interesting. This is the kind of book I want to be able to read to my daughter so that she can grow up understanding that women need not settle for supporting roles in their own lives. I hold this book so highly, not because it is lovely but because it is necessary. Fairy tales like this are integral to establishing a female literary canon, and I hope to read many more of its kind so that for every milksop princess with spindle-pricked fingers, impractically long hair and glass footwear we'll have a heroine with a quick wit, a ready dagger and a yearning for an adventure not named Prince Charming.(less)

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Jul 07, 2009 Michelle rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, award_winner, book_club, to-reread, dtb-own, feminism, faerie, fairy-tales

a son of a sultan sneaks out of the palace at night to listen to a more-than-half wild creature tell him wonderous tales. she's an orphan of unknown parentage living out in the gardens of the palace, and she has innumerable stories inked across her eyelids that she spins out unfinished night to night like Scheherazade. as the characters in each tale interact with someone else, they begin telling their own tale before finishing the first, resulting in a russian-nested-dolls approach to storytelli...more

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Aug 30, 2012 Karen rated it 5 of 5 stars

I came to know Catherynne M. Valente through the work of SJ Tucker. These conspirators have joined forces to craft wonders of magic to delight the world. Inspired by Valente’s novel The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden, Tucker recorded the album For the Girl in the Garden and the songs "The Girl in the Garden" and "Shipful of Monsters" are offered as "official companions" to that novel. This tale, rightfully compared to Arabian Nights, takes us on a twisted, layered maze of tangled lives. The...more

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May 22, 2010 Siria rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 21st-century, american-fiction, fantasy

This is much the kind of book I would expect to be written by someone who changed her name to 'Catherynne', with that spelling—it's all fantastical creatures and quests and magic. It is a much more intelligent book than I expected, with stories nested within stories, and gender tropes are inverted (there are no damsels in distress here) to my great satisfaction. The maiden is the monster is the pirate; women can grow up to be fierce warriors.

However, the Arabian Nights-style format can be a litt...more

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Aug 25, 2011 Terri Kempton rated it 5 of 5 stars

Boy, can Valente tell a story! Not only that, but she can weave together so many strands of storytelling that it's a marvel to behold the resulting tapestry. She tucks stories within stories, up to seven levels deep (if I counted correctly). And yet readers are led through strange and magical lands by a confident hand so that nothing is confusing and nothing is lost. This is a guide to trust! Can't wait to read the next one. Highly recommended if you are looking for a real immersion experience,...more

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Feb 02, 2013 DavidO rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

This book is like Arabian Nights, only it was interesting and full of endless imagination (Arabian nights gets a bit repetitive in both language and story). The stories here are layered like an onion, one might say, but one would be wrong. The different layers of the onion touch not only their neighbors but distant neighbors and sometimes the layers of other onions.

And the mythology she creates is quite wonderful and feels very real and human and original. The characters are endless, and the se...more

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Apr 02, 2011 aboxofcereal rated it 5 of 5 stars

In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente is a novel that is told through a series of stories within stories, and each story runs for about four or five pages before there is a shift to the next one usually related by a character from that particular story, or steps back to the previous story which, of course, was told by one of its characters, and then that story continues once again. Oftentimes, up to five stories are running concurrently between each other. The novel cuts back and forth be...more

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Jan 02, 2013 Bloomie rated it 1 of 5 stars

God awful. Was it just me or was the story extremely difficult to follow? A story within a story was interesting enough, but then it became a story within a story within a story within a story...my head was spinning. I had to go back every few pages to attempt to recover where I was, and after about page 80, to no avail. The writing is showy and shows great potential in some places, but then just falls flat as it is overdone in looping spirals similar to the style in which it was written. I was...more

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Jan 01, 2012 Gretchen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Gretchen by: Carl

Shelves: reread, 2011

I can't quite give this a five, though it's a very strong four. I love the interwoven tales within tales and recurring characters, and how the stories start off as "proper" fairy tales that then twist off sideways in new and interesting ways. This was a reread, but my memory is poor enough (a definite handicap in a book this intricate) that most of it was fresh.

It's definitely wonderful, but it's written in a way that keeps bringing me out of immersion; it's so cleverly written it seems to be po...more

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What's The Name o...: Boy and girl meet secretly in a garden and tell stories to each other [s]	2	30	Jul 17, 2012 10:26pm
Endicott Mythic F...: In the Night Garden (The Orphan's Tales, #1) - Discussion	7	47	May 21, 2009 01:08pm

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About Catherynne M. Valente

Catherynne M. Valente was born on Cinco de Mayo, 1979 in Seattle, WA, but grew up in in the wheatgrass paradise of Northern California. She graduated from high school at age 15, going on to UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics. She then drifted away from her M.A. program and into a long residence in the concrete and cam...more

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Books by Catherynne M. Valente

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland, #1)

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (Fairyland, #2)

In the Cities of Coin and Spice (The Orphan's Tales, #2)

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Quotes from In the Night Garden

“Never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch.” — 120 people liked it

“We all have someone we think shines so much more than we do that we are not even a moon to their sun, but a dead little rock floating in space next to their gold and their blaze.” — 25 people liked it

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In the Night Garden (The Orphan's Tales #1)

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