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First book of 2026! This was The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente with illustrations by Michael Kaluta. I have no recollection of how this ended up on my TBR and I was a little skeptical checking it out in the library, but I'm glad I stuck with it because it ended up being a lot of fun and I will definitely check out the second volume.

You might be a little confused in the beginning, as In the Night Garden is a series of nested stories within stories and the style takes a minute to get used to, but it's worth it. Valente unfolds a veritable matryoshka of tales into neat blooms whose petals all fit together. Retroactive reveals and recontextualiations are delightful here. 

Valente's vivid prose brings together her fantastical tales with such clarity; she attends frequently to all five senses, so that the reader knows what the characters are not only seeing, but hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling as well. There's obviously a lot of fairy tale inspiration here, but Valente definitely brings her own flavor. Women are almost always the hero of Valente's tales (though they play the villains too!) and there are such a great variety of them. Monsters abound too, but they get their chance to tell a tale too. (There's also some gentle ribbing at the Arthurian legends, with one witch lamenting about "all that questing" princes get up to.)

I was so engrossed in the work I didn't realize until quite late in the book how little romance factors into it. In a fairy tale inspired book like this, I would have expected a great many characters motivated by romance, but I can only think of two here who are primarily motivated by a love interest, and this delights me too. I'm arospec myself and while I enjoy a good tale of romance, I also weary of how frequently and totally it is centered in stories, so I was really enthused by how little that's the case here.

Friendship and family relationships do make frequent appearances though, and the friendship between the orphan teller of tales and the young boy hanging onto her words is the framing story. Love between mother and daughter, between brother and sister, even between strangers is a common thread.

She also avoids a pitfall I see in various modern fantasy stories which are so keen to explain the magic of their world they strip it of all mystery. Valente's world remains largely unexplained and asks the reader to simply take it as it is, which I found fun and appropriately mysterious.

The style of the book allows Valente to pull in a great many diverse characters and voices, which she does it well. Most impressive though is her ability to pull a cohesive tapestry out of all the various threads she's juggling.

A really fun and unusual story which I enjoyed a lot--a great start to a new year of reading!