In the Cities of Coin and Spice

August 20, 2007
The second and concluding volume of Tiptree Award–winner Valente's Orphan's Tales (after 2006's In the Night Garden
), structured as a series of nested stories, is a fairy tale lover's wildest dream come true. A mysterious orphan girl, whose eyelids are darkly tattooed with the closely packed words from a seemingly endless number of fantastical tales, lives secretly in a palace garden. The girl shares her stories with the enthralled young heir to the Sultanate, who returns again and again to hear incredible yarns about one-armed heroes, hunchbacked ferrymen, giants, voracious gem eaters, conniving hedgehogs, harpies, djinns and singing Manticores. But with the wedding of the prince's sister Dinarzad (a not-so-subtle homage to The Arabian Nights
) quickly approaching and harsh reality encroaching on the surreal garden, the orphan girl's stories finally run out. Cleverly examining and reconstructing the conventions of the fairy tale, especially the traditional roles of men and women, Valente has created a thought-provoking storytelling tour de force.

Starred review from October 15, 2007
Within the garden dwells an orphan girl whose eyelids are inked with an infinity of fabulous tales she shares with those who ask, but mostly with a young boy marked as nobility. Whether spinning a magical story of mythical creatures or telling of two children who escape a life of misery by making coins from their own flesh to buy their freedom, her tales interweave with one another and with the complex events taking place both within and outside of the garden. Continuing the fantasy she began with "In the Night Garden", Valente creates in this second and concluding volume a masterpiece of imagery and sensual detail while evoking an entire world through the medium of mythmaking. As with its predecessor, this Arabian Nights-like fantasy belongs in every library.

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2007
An orphan who lives in the sultans garden relates the legends inked on her skin to a princea series of nested stories that unfolds across the backdrop of preparations for the princess Dinarazads wedding. From a city destroyed by a monster created from one mans insatiable hunger, to coins made of bones, to a golden ball that was the king of the hedgehogs, to the children of a fallen star, to the land of the dead, the tales continue, building on one another until the orphan can no longer read them herself and asks the prince to decipher them and tell her what remainsnamely, the endings of stories whose beginnings are all that she has read.The fairy-tale ending is not a saccharine happily-ever-after aimed at children but one that brings the scattered pieces together in a fantastic whole, revealing Valentes Orphans Tales, begun in In the Night Garden (2006), to be a single, lovely, epical, awe-inspiring piece of work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)