Palimpsest

December 8, 2008
Four strangers are bound together in adventure, love and occasional sorrow in this parable from Tiptree winner Valente (The Orphan's Tales
). The city of Palimpsest exists somewhere outside our reality, accessible only during the sleep that follows sex. The “immigrants” to Palimpsest, marked forever by the tattoo-like impression of a map on their skin, seek out one another for real-world sexual adventures that function as passports to new otherworldly quarters. In outstandingly beautiful prose, Valente describes grotesque, glamorous creatures sometimes neither human nor animal, alive nor dead, and mortal travelers who pursue poignant personal quests to replace the things (and people) they've lost. Valente's fondness for digression at times makes for a difficult read, and her fable of quest and loneliness is less an engrossing fairy tale and more a meticulous travelogue of a stranger's dream.

February 15, 2009
Four travelers, each suffering the loss of a person or a dream, find their way to the miraculous city of Palimpsest, a place attainable only by those with the eyes to see it. Their journeys are intensely personal yet tied to together. The author of "The Orphan's Tales" (e.g., "In the Night Garden") continues her lyrical allegories, which give readers a feast of carefully chosen words and unforgettable images. Fans of literary fantasy should enjoy this foray into the sensual imagination.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2009
Everyone lucky or doomed enough to go to Palimpsest, a city visited only in dreams, awakes bearing a tattooed map of its neighborhoods. Each of four travelers linked by ink stains in a frog-headed fortune-tellers shop finds an unimaginable fate in the city, such that waking life becomes a search for readmission to Palimpsest. Sei dreams of trains, November of mechanical bees, Ludovico of the unwritten etymology of the city, and Oleg of his drowned sister. Palimpsest becomes what each most desires in ways only a city of sentient trains, mechanical insects, and shark-headed generals could. History unfolds as the four learn the ways of Palimpsest and discover the price of becoming more than tourists. Each has found something he or she lost in the waking world that is reimagined in the ways of Palimpsest, and nearly everyone who goes there yearns to emigrate. Overflowing with poetic images and epic repetition, Valentes story washes us to an unexpected shore.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)